Israeli President Blasts ‘Blood Libel’ at Hague, Says Court ‘Twisted’ Words to Contend Genocidal Intent

Israeli President Isaac Herzog blasted the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its handling of the genocide allegations against Israel on Monday, describing it as a “blood libel” and accusing it of “twisting” his words to make the claim that Israel sees all Gazans as legitimate military targets. 

“There is something shocking about seeing how the ‘post-truth’ phenomenon permeates even the most important institutions,” Herzog said during an event for fallen IDF soldiers at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem. 

Herzog accused the court of misrepresenting his statements following the October 7 Hamas massacre, suggesting that he viewed all Gazan civilians as legitimate military targets. 

“I was disgusted by the way they twisted my words, using very, very partial and fragmented quotes, with the intention of supporting an unfounded legal contention,” he said.

He went on to emphasize that Israel abides by international law and is committed to the protection of civilians in Gaza.

The Court on Friday ruled that Israel could “plausibly” be committing acts of genocide but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire in a 15-2 decision. 

Herzog’s comments from an October 12 briefing were included in South Africa’s submission along with a litany of remarks by Israelis that Pretoria said showed “genocidal intent”, including by notable Israelis outside the halls of power, including celebrities. 

“They were not simply quoting people from the chain of command who are obviously relevant, they were quoting people from anywhere they could find, including TV personalities, singers, and goodness knows what,” Israeli diplomat and international lawyer Daniel Taub told journalists in a phone call on Sunday. 

Herzog’s alleged inflammatory remarks were presented by the ICJ as a single statement when in fact it was several sentences cobbled together and taken out of context. 

“It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat,” Herzog said five days after the attack. 

Asked to clarify by a reporter whether that meant that they were, “by implication, legitimate targets,” the Israeli president said, “No, I didn’t say that.”

“We are operating militarily according to the rules of international rules. Period. Unequivocally,” he said. 

On Sunday, he said: “I was here – in this very hall – a few days after the terrible massacre, when I was asked by the world’s media about the situation in Gaza, I replied that the widespread civilian support in Gaza for the crimes and atrocities of October 7 could not be ignored, and that Hamas operates from the heart of the civilian population everywhere, from children’s bedrooms in homes, from schools, from mosques, and hospitals.

“But I added and emphasized, that for the State of Israel – and of course for me personally – innocent civilians are not considered targets in any way whatsoever.

“There are also innocent Palestinians in Gaza. I am deeply sorry for the tragedy they are going through. From the first day of the war right until today, I call and am working for humanitarian aid for them, and only for them. This is part of our values as a country,” he added. 

“But the reality cannot be ignored, a reality which we all saw with our own eyes as published by Hamas on that cursed day: and that was the involvement of many residents of Gaza in the slaughter, in the looting, and in the riots of October 7. How the crowds in Gaza cheered at the sight of Israelis being slaughtered and their bodies mutilated. At the sight of hostages – God knows what they did to them – wounded and bleeding being dragged through the streets. In view of such terrible crimes, it is appropriate that the honorable court investigates them in depth, and not casually in passing,” Herzog said.

He added that Hamas was also “responsible for the suffering of their own people.”

The fact that the ICJ hearing to judge whether the “democratic, moral and responsible State of Israel, which rose from the ashes of the Holocaust,” took place on the eve of the International Holocaust Memorial Day, “undermined the very values on which this court was established,” he said. 

Israel has been requested to submit a report to the Hague in one month’s time regarding the steps it is taking to protect civilian lives in Gaza. “In practice that shouldn’t be difficult because there’s nothing in the order that Israel isn’t committed to anyway. But [there are] political implications of continuing to cooperate with the court,” Taub said.

Taub went on to say that the ICJ case was not only putting Israel on trial, but western democracies at large. 

“The question is does international law give law-abiding countries tools with which they can lawfully confront terrorist groups that are adopting these kinds of cynical tactics?” 

If the court would have found Israel guilty of genocide and ordered it to call a ceasefire, then democracies around the world would have had “enormous frustrations”, Taub said, in upholding international law themselves. They would see the ruling as a “suicide pact” particularly in light of the fact that Israel’s military goes to greater lengths than some of them in avoiding civilian deaths, he said.

South Africa’s 84-page submission contained footnotes from an “incestuous circle of UN bodies that are all quoting each other,” he said, with “facts and figures that have very little independent verification.” 

Journalist Yair Rosenberg has pointed to several statements allegedly made by senior Israeli officials that purportedly point to genocidal intent as either grossly misrepresented or not said at all. One is a quote attributed to Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant, which reads: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” As Rosenberg notes in The Atlantic, the quote, in its truncated version, was cited by The New York Times, (twice) NPR, the BBC, The Washington Post, and in The Guardian. Gallant actually said: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” 

“This mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet,” Rosenberg wrote in The Atlantic. 

Rosenberg also said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s quote from the Bible about Amalek, which was used by the Court and several media outlets to point to the targeting of civilians as policy, was actually misunderstood. Whereas Netanyahu was quoting Deuteronomy, the South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi argued in the Hague that he was quoting from the book of Samuel, written hundreds of years later and containing a directive to kill all Amalekites including “women, children and infants, cattle and sheep.”

“These omissions and misinterpretations are not merely cosmetic: They misled readers, judges, and politicians. None of them should have happened,” Rosenberg writes. 

No one should be “cavalierly accusing people or countries of committing genocide based on thirdhand mistranslations or truncated quotations,” he concluded.

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