The government needed to consider further measures to address the harm that Israel continued to inflict on the people of Gaza, international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor said in the National Assembly on Wednesday.
As Israel prepares to invade Rafah, where about 2-million Palestinians have sought refuge, and as it continues to block the entry into Gaza of trucks carrying aid, including desperately needed food, Pandor said more action was needed by the SA government.
“I do think more action must be considered by the government in order to indicate the serious concerns we have particularly now with the threats that are being made to Palestinians who are now gathered in Rafah. The threat of an onslaught on Rafah is presaging a horrible catastrophe,” Pandor said. “We are extremely concerned.”
SA should also consider what steps it could take to support the call for all hostages held by Hamas to be freed, the minister said.
Pandor said during a question-and-answer session with ministers in the peace and security cluster in the National Assembly that SA needed to be “far stricter” where there was oppression and the denial of human rights.
SA, she added, was working with a number of countries that shared its views on the situation in Gaza, where she believed that there was an intent by Israel to commit genocide.
SA was instrumental in bringing an application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under the Genocide Convention for the court to impose provisional measures on Israel pending the conclusion of a legal process as to whether it was committing genocide. The court decided in a ruling on January 26 to impose provisional measures on Israel and gave the country a month to report as to what it had done to implement them.
The provisional measures included requiring Israel not to kill Palestinians, not to inflict bodily or mental harm and conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the group in whole or in part, and not to impose measures preventing birth within the group.
Pandor said Israel had not responded positively to the ICJ ruling and SA had alerted the ICJ of its concerns. She said SA would have an opportunity to respond to Israel’s report, which was submitted this week.
Palestine has also applied to the ICJ to determine whether Israel’s occupation of the territory constituted a form of apartheid and therefore contravened the UN charter and universal declaration of human rights. SA is one of 56 other countries have made a submission in this regard.
Pandor said the cabinet still had to deliberate and take a decision on the resolution passed by the National Assembly for the government to close the Israeli embassy and to suspend diplomatic ties until a ceasefire was agreed to by Israel and it committed to binding UN-facilitated negotiations, the outcome of which must be a two-state solution.
SA has already closed its embassy in Israel and Israel has withdrawn its ambassador from SA. There is an SA embassy in Ramallah, which is servicing the region.
The EFF complained that it was “very out of order” for the cabinet to have taken so long to make a decision on the resolution.
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