The International Court of Justice ruled Friday that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian Territories is illegal and called on it to stop building settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas hailed the decision while Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said it cannot alter the “legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland”.
The top UN court said Friday that Israel’s presence in the Palestinian Territories is “unlawful” and called on it to end and for settlement construction to stop immediately, issuing an unprecedented, sweeping condemnation of Israel’s rule over the lands it captured 57 years ago.
In a non-binding opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) pointed to a wide list of policies, including the building and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, use of the area's natural resources, the annexation and imposition of permanent control over lands and discriminatory policies against Palestinians, all of which it said violated international law.
The 15-judge panel said Israel's “abuse of its status as the occupying power” renders its “presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful.” It says its continued presence was “illegal” and should be ended as “rapidly as possible”.
It said Israel must end settlement construction immediately and that existing settlements must be removed, according to the 83-page opinion read out by court President Nawaf Salam.
Israel, which normally considers the United Nations and international tribunals as unfair and biased, did not send a legal team to the hearings. But it submitted written comments, saying that the questions put to the court are prejudiced and fail to address Israeli security concerns. Israeli officials have said the court's intervention could undermine the peace process, which has been stagnant for more than a decade.
The Palestinian militant group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, called for "immediate" international action to end Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories after the ICJ issued its ruling.
A statement from the group, which has been fighting Israel in Gaza since leading the deadly October 7 attacks on southern Israel, said the ruling puts "the international system before the imperative of immediate action to end the occupation".
The office of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas welcomed a "historic" decision by the ICJ.
"The presidency welcomes the decision of the International Court of Justice, considers it a historic decision and demands that Israel be compelled to implement it," it said in a statement on its official news agency shortly after the ruling was made public.
In response to the ruling, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the West Bank and East Jerusalem were part of the Jewish people's historical “homeland”.
“The Jewish people are not conquerors in their own land – not in our eternal capital Jerusalem and not in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria,” he said in a post on X. “No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth and likewise the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be contested.”
The court's opinion, sought by the UN General Assembly after a Palestinian request, is unlikely to affect Israel's policy. But its resounding breadth – including saying Israel could not claim sovereignty in the territories and was impeding Palestinians' right to self-determination – could impact international opinion.
It came against the backdrop of Israel’s devastating 10-month military assault on Gaza, which was triggered by the October 7 attacks. In a separate case, the ICJ is considering a South African claim that Israel’s campaign in Gaza amounts to genocide, a claim that Israel vehemently denies.
Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Mideast war. The Palestinians seek all three areas for an independent state.
Israel considers the West Bank to be disputed territory, whose future should be decided in negotiations, while it has moved population there in settlements to solidify its hold. It has annexed East Jerusalem in a move that is not internationally recognized. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but maintained a blockade of the territory after Hamas took power there in 2007. The international community generally considers all three areas to be occupied territory.
At hearings in February, then-Palestinian Authority foreign minister Riad Malki accused Israel of apartheid and urged the United Nations’ top court to declare that Israel’s occupation of lands sought by the Palestinians is illegal and must end immediately and unconditionally for any hope for a two-state future to survive.
The Palestinians presented arguments in February along with 49 nations and three international organisations.
Ruling ‘worsens the case for occupation’
Erwin van Veen, a senior research fellow at the Clingendael think tank in The Hague, said that a court ruling that Israel’s policies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem breach international law would “isolate Israel further internationally, at least from a legal point of view”.
He said such a ruling would “worsen the case for occupation. It removes any kind of legal, political, philosophical underpinning of the Israeli expansion project.”
It would also strengthen the hand of “those who seek to advocate against it” – such as the grassroots Palestinian-led movement advocating boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
He said it could also increase the number of countries that recognise the state of Palestine, particularly in the West, following the recent examples of Spain, Norway and Ireland.
Security measure vs land grab
It is not the first time the ICJ has been asked to give its legal opinion on Israeli policies. Two decades ago, the court ruled that Israel’s West Bank separation barrier was “contrary to international law”. Israel boycotted those proceedings, saying they were politically motivated.
Israel says the barrier is a security measure. Palestinians say the structure amounts to a massive land grab because it frequently dips into the West Bank.
Israel has built well over 100 settlements, according to the anti-settlement monitoring group Peace Now. The West Bank settler population has grown by more than 15 percent in the past five years to more than 500,000 Israelis, according to a pro-settler group.
Israel also has annexed East Jerusalem and considers the entire city to be its capital. An additional 200,000 Israelis live in settlements built in East Jerusalem that Israel considers to be neighbuorhoods of its capital. Palestinian residents of the city face systematic discrimination, making it difficult for them to build new homes or expand existing ones.
The international community considers all settlements to be illegal or obstacles to peace since they are built on lands sought by the Palestinians for their state.
Netanyahu’s hard-line government is dominated by settlers and their political supporters. Netanyahu has given his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a former settler leader, unprecedented authority over settlement policy. Smotrich has used this position to cement Israel’s control over the West Bank by pushing forward plans to build more settlement homes and to legalise outposts.
Authorities recently approved the appropriation of 12.7 square kilometres (nearly 5 square miles) of land in the Jordan Valley, a strategic piece of land deep inside the West Bank, according to a copy of the order obtained by The Associated Press. Data from Peace Now, the tracking group, indicate it was the largest single appropriation approved since the 1993 Oslo accords at the start of the peace process.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)
