French FM: Israel`s genocide ‘Crosses a Moral threshold’
Sudan Events – Sumaya Sayed
France does not back a case against Israel at the UN’s top court accusing the country of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, the French foreign minister said on Wednesday.
“Accusing the Jewish state of genocide crosses a moral threshold. The notion of genocide cannot be exploited for political ends,” Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne told parliament.
South Africa has launched an emergency case at the ICJ, arguing last week that Israel stands in breach of the UN Genocide Convention signed in 1948 in the wake of the Holocaust.
At least 24,448 Palestinians, more than 70 percent of them women, young children and adolescents, have been killed in the subsequent Israeli bombardments and ground assaults in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Israel and its ally the United States have dismissed the case at the ICJ as groundless.
US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller has said the South African case was “unfounded”, claiming it was “those who are violently attacking Israel who continue to openly call for the annihilation of Israel.”
The German government has “decisively and expressly” rejected South Africa’s accusations against Israel, calling it a “political instrumentalization” of the UN Genocide Convention with “no basis in fact.”
Namibia, a former German colony, has expressed “deep concern” over Germany’s stance, criticizing its “inability to draw lessons from its horrific history.”
Germany was responsible for the massacres of more than 70,000 Indigenous Herero and Nama people in Namibia between 1904 and 1908, which historians widely consider the first genocide of the 20th century.
