At the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on Thursday, as hearings began in a case brought against the IDF’s Operation Iron Swords in Gaza, South Africa accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians.
Dear 15 judges: While you try to determine whether Israel has committed genocide, here are a few reminders of what genocide looks like.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, genocide is “the crime of intentionally destroying part or all of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group by killing people or by other methods.”
On October 7, 2023, hundreds of Hamas terrorists, aided by ordinary Gazan Palestinians, began committing genocide against Jews and Israelis.
In an orchestrated plan to murder Jews and destroy the only Jewish state, they were prepared to kill thousands of Jews, as many as they could reach. Their instructions on how to carry out this genocide included elements that were similar to the Nazi agenda against Jews, which in some cases were even mentioned.
No room for Jews
Hamas’s main agenda is clear: from the river to the sea, they want to see Palestinians. Muslims. No Jews. That, my friends, is ethnic cleansing. Israel, meanwhile, is fighting to free hundreds of kidnapped citizens and soldiers and destroying a terror organization that has only one goal: to murder Jews and make the Jewish state disappear.
Meanwhile, Israel is defending itself. That is not apartheid. That is not a plan to kill women and children. The opposite is true.
The testimonials of survivors of the massacre, as well as of police and ZAKA volunteers, portray a horror movie that Alfred Hitchcock could not have created. Heads were cut off. Women were shot in their genitals. Breasts were brutally cut off, and the terrorists played catch with them. Children burned alive while tied to each other with an electronic cable. That is merely a glimpse into Hamas’s barbaric murder of Jews only because they were Jews.
“There was a situation where they laid down a woman, and I understand that he [a Hamas terrorist] was raping her. He shifted her position and then passed her on to another person. She was alive while being raped. She stood on her legs but was bleeding. He pulled her hair; she wasn’t dressed. He cut her breast and threw it on the road. They played with them (the breasts), throwing them back and forth while the woman was leaning with her head back.” That was just one of the hundreds of testimonials collected by the Israel Police from officers, citizens, and volunteers who either witnessed the horrors or received the dead bodies.
“Their hands were bound; the two we had seen… Tied behind their back,” a police officer said in a video during interrogation.
“There was the body of a woman who had a blood stain on her genitalia,” he continued. “At first, I thought she might have had a mishap out of fear… The shooting was targeted at sexual organs. We saw that a lot. They had a thing with sexual organs, both in women and in men. We mainly saw either breast amputations or gunshots to the breasts. Simply shooting from one side of the breast to the other.”
Shneor Gol, head of the ZAKA team in Tel Aviv, recounted a harrowing experience:
“They decapitated heads and placed them with the incorrect bodies on purpose. When Shabbat began, I thought there would be rest, but our CEO, Tzvi Hassid, told me that according to the rabbis, we were obliged to continue the identification and treatment of the murdered. I was in the room, starting to undress a body. I was trying to remove the clothes, and then I reached the lower half of the body. As I went to remove the trousers to take out a protruding object, I recognized it. Among the [dead] children, there was a gun they probably used to kill someone or a sword they used.
“Then someone shouted at me to stop. I stepped back in panic and thought, What could it be? Then the pathologist hugged me and said, ‘Shneor, move; you’re about to kill all of us.’ I asked what I did, and he told me, ‘These are live grenades; this is a terrorist.’ I stepped back and then called the police to neutralize it. I went outside and asked myself, What have we done? Why do they want to kill us?”
The New York Times recently published just a few of the incidents of sexual abuse, although Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,000 Israelis. They shared a grainy video that emerged in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre, just one day later. It showed a woman, her clothes in disarray, lying in a state of vulnerability. Her face was unrecognizable, marked by the horrors of the previous night’s attack at a rave. The video, captured by someone searching for a missing friend, quickly went viral, igniting widespread anxiety as thousands feared the woman might be a missing loved one.
Among the viewers, a family from a central Israeli town recognized the victim as Gal Abdush, a mother of two. She had disappeared that night along with her husband, turning a national tragedy into a personal and irreplaceable loss for her family.
The Times (UK) also investigated the atrocities. Yoni Saadon, a 39-year-old father of four who attended the Supernova music festival in Re’im, shared a heartbreaking account of a young woman who sought refuge from the terrorists next to him under the stage.
“I saw this beautiful woman with the face of an angel and eight or ten of the fighters beating and raping her,” he recounted.
“She was screaming, ‘Stop it already. I’m going to die anyway from what you are doing; just kill me!’ When they finished, they were laughing, and the last one shot her in the head.
“She fell to the ground, shot in the head, and I pulled her body over me and smeared her blood on me so it would look like I was dead too,” he continued. “I will never forget her face. Every night I wake up to it and apologize to her, saying, ‘I’m sorry.’”
He added, “They caught a young woman near a car, and she was fighting back, not allowing them to strip her. They threw her to the ground, and one of the terrorists took a shovel and beheaded her, and her head rolled along the ground. I see that head too,” he said, according to The Times.
THE WORLD should know about the atrocities committed by Hamas. They should see the photo of the 10-year-old girl whose head was cut off. They should hear about the sexual torture committed against women and men. The Israeli government and the IDF should share these images and videos. They should expose the true face of the Palestinian people. They don’t want peace; they don’t want a two-state solution. They want to commit genocide.
They want to kill every single Jew, whether in the West Bank or within the Green Line.
In their minds, the establishment of Israel in 1948 was a tragedy. A mistake. Something that needs to be eliminated.
But guess what? We are alive and strong. We are here to stay. This war, unfortunately, will last for decades, but we will prevail.
Am Israel Chai.