Category World News

Public hearings on Israel’s obligations regarding allowing United Nations organizations and other relief organizations to work in the Palestinian territory it occupies were concluded by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on May 2.

Since Monday, a panel of judges has heard oral arguments from 40 nations, including China, France, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom.

The UN General Assembly requested a decision in December, so the court will likely go through months of deliberation before making a decision.

Since starting a genocidal war against Gaza on October 7, 2023, many of the participating states have condemned Israel for severely restricting humanitarian aid to the region.

Israel has completely stopped providing any kind of aid, including food or medicine, for the past two months, accelerating the famine and medical crises.

What can we learn from the hearings in particular:

The Palestinians as a people are threatened by starvation.

Israel, as an occupying power, was generally agreed to be required to permit aid organizations to aid the people it occupy, particularly in Gaza, which Israel is also bombing.

According to Juliette McIntyre, a legal scholar at the University of South Australia, Israel’s violations of human rights have weakened.

She noted that nearly all of the states that spoke at the hearings made it clear that Palestinians need humanitarian aid in order to ensure their survival, safeguard their right to eventual self-determination, and protect the UN system as a whole and the treaties that support it.

She stated in a nutshell that the majority of states concur that Israel should not be able to starve the civilians under its control or interfere with UN agencies’ relief efforts.

Israel is an occupying power, according to her statement to Al Jazeera, “every state, with the exception of two, agrees.”

What was said by Israel?

Israel made written allegations that the court had engaged in anti-Semitism and called the hearings a “circus.”

Additionally, it claimed that it has no authority to cooperate with what it described as compromised UN organizations or aid organizations and that its sovereign right to “defend itself” is superior to its responsibility to provide aid to the people it occupies.

Israel has not previously dissented from ICJ sessions that result in advisory opinions.

US assertion

Heidi Matthews, a senior associate professor of law at York University in Canada, claimed that the US supported Israel.

She continued, claiming that the US purposefully avoided discussing the facts on the ground and attempted to distance Israel from responsibility.

Matthews claimed that while the US primarily advised Israel to uphold its legal obligations under international law, it did not provide specifics about Israel’s actions or request that it take concrete steps to end the humanitarian crisis it brought on.

According to Matthews, “this kind of highly formalist and factually empty approach to law is characteristic of one type of fascist engagement with legal argument.”

According to Adel Haque, a legal scholar at Rutgers University, the US tried to “spook” the court by bringing up Israel’s unsupported claims that the UN relief agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) had been a Hamas ally.

UNRWA, which assists Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee as refugees as a result of Zionist ethnic cleansing, was banned in Israel in October 2024.

According to Haque, the US is betting that the court will be persuaded, so it is attempting to encourage a more “general” advisory opinion.

According to him, “essentially, if the advisory opinion is made at such a high level of generality, it wouldn’t say anything about Israel’s conduct at all” in his statement to Al Jazeera.

As more than two million Palestinians in Gaza are facing genocidal violence from Israel, they are starving.

ICJ cases acting as a substitute for legal action

Although ICJ advisory opinions affirm international laws and standards, they cannot change local circumstances, and some nations may be asking for their opinions rather than taking specific, coordinated legal action against Israel, according to Haque.

In these hearings, “Many]European states have brought allegations that Israel is breaking its obligations before the ICJ. But the question is now, “What will these states do to address this?” he told Al Jazeera.

He noted that the recent hearings, which Israel had used to denounce its obstructing aid, and that it had not done enough to speak out against Israel.

France also mentioned how urgently Israel should facilitate aid to Gaza.

However, according to Haque, the statements appear to be attempts to replace Europe’s collective inaction against Israel in Gaza.

“States are responsible for making their own decisions regarding [Israel’s actions], not to wait for the court to decide what they already know,” Haque continued.

The ICJ will rule when and how?

Months from now on, the ICJ is not expected to release an advisory opinion.

According to legal experts, the advisory opinion’s non-binding nature is unlikely to compel Israel or its member states to make a change of course.

In response to a genocide case brought against Israel by South Africa in December 2023, Israel has ignored a previous binding provisional measure by the ICJ that had ordered it to increase humanitarian aid and stop genocide in Gaza.

Israel has not been subject to any state’s sanctions for breaking the provisional measures.

According to McIntyre, the court will eventually make a constrained ruling outlining Israel’s obligations to provide aid and cooperate with UNRWA.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians may already be starved to death or have experienced ethnic cleansing from Israel by the time the court issues its opinion.

Australians are heading to the polls shortly in parliamentary elections which will decide if Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s centre-left Labor government will return for a second term.

Labor’s main rival is the country’s conservative coalition, led by opposition leader Peter Dutton, which came into the election campaign polling strongly but is now lagging slightly behind Labor.

If Albanese does win, it could mean Australia is following in similar footsteps to Canada, where the Liberal party reversed its prospects in recent weeks, amid concerns about the effect of United States President Donald Trump’s policies on Canada’s economy.

Amy Remeikis, chief political analyst at the Australia Institute, an independent research centre, told Al Jazeera that polls indicate President Trump is “an increasing concern for Australian voters” and that “Labor’s gamble of holding a later election to allow some of Trump’s policies to start to impact has paid off.”

In comparison with Canada, where both major parties tried to distance themselves from Trump, Remeikis notes that Australia’s opposition leader Dutton has courted “favourable comparisons” to Trump for months.

But, he has been “badly damaged by the ‘Temu Trump’ label” – a reference to the Chinese online shopping website known for selling cheap copies of original brands.

War on Gaza and the price of eggs

Uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs on Australia has only compounded the concerns of many Australians around the cost of essential items, including housing, food, healthcare and childcare.

In the final televised leaders’ debate, a week before the election, both Dutton and Albanese stumbled when asked to guess how much a dozen eggs might cost at a supermarket.

Albanese was closer, guessing 7 Australian dollars, nearly two dollars less than the actual price of $8.80, while Dutton guessed $4.20, less than half the actual price.

Cost of living has “trumped everything” leading into the election, says Josie Hess, who comes from the Latrobe Valley, a coal-mining region in Victoria, and who also works for advocacy group Environment Victoria.

For a number of Australians, the most important issue on election day will be beyond Australia’s borders, says Nasser Mashni, the president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN).

Mashni told Al Jazeera that “the genocide that is occurring in Palestine” has seen a “new constituency” emerge in Australia that understands that Israel is “a settler colonialist movement doing exactly what occurred here [in Australia] 238 years ago”.

APAN has developed a scorecard of where the major parties stand on Palestine. Of those, only the Greens received a tick from APAN on every issue. The scorecard for Labor was mixed, while the conservative Liberal-National coalition did not meet a single criterion.

“We’ve asked for people to make Palestine their number one issue and to find a candidate that best reflects a just and humane position for Palestine,” Mashni said.

“Certainly, the easiest candidates to find will be in the Senate, but I am sure there’ll be somebody in every seat where they can vote a little bit better for Palestine, and in some cases, very well for Palestine,” he added.

Dozens of minor parties and independents from across the political spectrum are also vying for votes.

Remeikis said there is a “late surge to the nationalistic, far-right, One Nation party”, which has been aided by Dutton’s conservative coalition preferencing votes for One Nation, and vice versa, in outer suburban and inner regional seats. Next year marks 30 years since One Nation’s leader Pauline Hanson was first elected to federal office in Australia.

But Remeikis says the late surge is unlikely to affect the outcome of the election, with polls suggesting Labor will win with a minority government.

The Greens, along with some independents running on pro-climate action platforms, will also be hoping to repeat successes in Australia’s 2022 election, which followed many months of devastating fires and floods.

Going nuclear

With climate change remaining a key concern for many Australians, Dutton, whose party has long delayed taking action on climate, has chosen to focus on campaigning to build Australia’s first-ever nuclear power stations in areas where coal power stations are closing down, such as the Latrobe Valley, in Victoria.

This week, organisations representing more than 350,000 emergency and health services workers released a letter calling on Dutton to drop his plan to introduce nuclear energy to Australia, saying “Australia’s current emergency services do not have the support or resources to respond to nuclear disasters.”

Josie Hess, a Latrobe Valley local who works for Environment Victoria, told Al Jazeera that people there still have questions about the viability of Dutton’s proposal.

She says people in the valley “desperately need jobs” but the timeline to build nuclear means that it would do little to help workers now.

“We have some people who support nuclear but for the most part, the Latrobe Valley is not a monolith, and there is clear and demonstrable opposition to the proposal,” she said.

And while economic issues are a concern, she added, there is also an “intrinsic link between climate security and cost of living and housing”.

Melissa Sweet, who runs public health news site Croakey, told Al Jazeera that climate change remains a key issue for Australian health workers heading into the election.

“Heatwaves, floods, and bushfires are already driving up demand for emergency care, mental health services, and chronic disease management,” Sweet said.

“This is a war crime.” A representative of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition accused “Israel or one of its allies” of conducting what the group says was a drone attack on its ship carrying aid to Gaza. The Israeli government has not responded to the allegations.