Irish lawyer who worked on Bloody Sunday inquiry accuses Israel of genocide at Hague

Ms. Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh made the claim in the Hague, where she was acting for South Africa in its genocide case against Israel.

"The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people, despite the overt dehumanising genocidal rhetoric by Israeli governmental and military officials, matched by the Israeli military’s actions on the ground; despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian population being livestreamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers and televisions screens — the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate — so far vain — hope that the world might do something.

"Gaza represents nothing short of a ‘moral failure’, as described by the usually circumspect International Committee of the Red Cross. As underscored by United Nations Chiefs, that failure has ‘repercussions not just for the people of Gaza . . . but for the generations to come who will never forget these [over] 90 days of hell and of assaults on the most basic precepts of humanity’,” she told the court.

Earlier in her career Ní Ghrálaigh acted as a legal observer at the Bloody Sunday Inquiry.

She visited Derry and worked for a solicitor’s firm representing some of the families.

She told Irish Legal News in 2022 how it had been ‘an immense privilege to be part of that historic legal process, and to get to represent and know the families, a number of whom remain friends to this day’.

“Their unwavering dignity, resilience and steadfastness in seeking truth and justice over so many years was and remains utterly inspirational,” she said.

In making a case for genocide, Ms. Ní Ghrálaigh, showed the ICJ a photograph of a white board in a Gazan hospital.

“The white board is wiped clean of no longer possible surgical cases, leaving only a hand-written message by a Médecins Sans Frontières doctor which reads: ‘We did what we could. Remember us’,” she said.

She presented a second photograph of the same whiteboard, after an Israeli strike that ‘killed the author of the message, Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, along with two of his colleagues’.

“Just over a month later, in a powerful Christmas Day sermon, delivered from a church in Bethlehem — on the same day Israel had killed 250 Palestinians, including at least 86 people, many from the same family, massacred in a single strike on Maghazi Refugee Camp — Palestinian Pastor Munther Isaac addressed his congregation and the world. He said: ‘Gaza as we know it no longer exists. This is an annihilation. This is a genocide. We will rise. We will stand up again from the midst of destruction, as we have always done as Palestinians, although this is by far maybe the biggest blow we have received’.

"But he said: ‘No apologies will be accepted after the genocide . . . What has been done has been done. I want you to look at the mirror and ask, where was I when Gaza was going through a genocide.”

Bloody Sunday Trust in Derry urges Irish government to join South Africa in Gaza genocide action

Responding to South Africa on Friday, Israel said the case presented a ‘profoundly distorted factual and legal picture’.

Dr. Tal Becker, legal adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the court: “The attempt to weaponise the term genocide against Israel in the present context, does more than tell the Court a grossly distorted story, and it does more than empty the word of its unique force and special meaning.

"It subverts the object and purpose of the Convention itself – with ramifications for all States seeking to defend themselves against those who demonstrate total disdain for life and for the law.”

Dr. Becker went on to detail the atrocities committed during the Hamas-led incursion into Israel on October 7.

“What proceeded, under the cover of thousands of rockets fired indiscriminately into Israel, was the wholesale massacre, mutilation, rape and abduction of as many citizens as the terrorists could find before Israel’s security forces repelled them,” he told the court, adding that ‘some 1,200 people were butchered that day, more than 5,500 maimed, and some 240 hostages abducted, including infants, entire families, persons with disabilities and Holocaust survivors, some of whom have since been executed; many of whom have been tortured, sexually abused and starved in captivity’.

He added: “We know of the brutality of October 7 not only from the harrowing testimonies of the survivors, the unmistakable proof of carnage and sadism left behind, and the forensic evidence taken at the scene. We know it because the assailants proudly filmed and broadcast their barbarism.”

Dr. Becker said the events of October 7 were ‘all but ignored in the Applicant’s submissions’.

“We are compelled to share with the Court some fraction of its horror - the largest calculated mass murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust,” he said.

In answering the charges of genocide Israel, in turn, accused Hamas of ‘genocidal’ intent.

Dr. Becker said: “If the claim of the Applicant now is that in the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas, Israel must be denied the ability to defend its citizens – then the absurd upshot of South Africa’s argument is this: Under the guise of the allegation against Israel of genocide, this Court is asked to call for an end to operations against the ongoing attacks of an organization that pursues an actual genocidal agenda.

"An organization that has violated every past ceasefire and used it to rearm and plan new atrocities.

"An organization that declares its unequivocal resolve to advance its genocidal plans. That is an unconscionable request, and it is respectfully submitted that it cannot stand.”