One of the crazier claims in South Africa’s so-called “indictment” against Israel for “genocide” at the International Criminal Court (ICJ) Thursday was that Israel is “trying to prevent Palestinian births” because of the impact of the war on pregnant women.
The war was started by the Palestinian Hamas terror organization on October 7 when it launched a massive terror attack on Israel from Gaza. Among the roughly 1200 murdered victims were women and children — including, reportedly, a pregnant woman who had been mutilated.
South Africa’s submission to the ICJ is silent about the well-documented fact that Hamas uses hospitals in Gaza to store weapons, hide terrorists, and detain hostages. In one hospital, weapons were stowed in neonatal incubators.
Israel Defense ForcesInstead, the South African indictment spins a conspiracy theory that Israel is actually targeting pregnant Palestinian women (footnotes omitted):
Pregnant women and children –– including newborn babies –– are also particularly impacted by displacement, lack of access to food and water, shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation, and lack of access to health services. These effects are severe and significant. An estimated 5,500 of approximately 52,000 pregnant Palestinian women in Gaza giving birth each month are doing so in unsafe conditions, often with no clean water, much less medical assistance, “in shelters, in their homes, in the streets amid rubble, or in overwhelmed healthcare facilities, where sanitation is worsening, and the risk of infection and medical complications is on the rise”. Where they are able to get to a functioning hospital, pregnant women are having to undergo caesarean sections without anaesthetic.
The indictment provides no evidence that Israel intends to hurt these women — only a statement about the impact of the war. It also omits the fact that Hamas rockets have hit Israeli hospitals and that Hamas kidnapped children and raped Israeli women.
Among other errors, the indictment also misquotes the Bible in attempting to accuse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of using the Bible to order “genocide”: it cites Samuel instead of the relevant passage of Deuteronomy, familiar from the Torah.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
