A damning analysis of the argument presented by Israel’s lawyers in its defense against South Africa’s genocide case finds that Israel’s legal team made false or misleading claims about evidence that it submitted to the court, undermining its arguments that its massacre in Gaza is justified.
This includes assertions, the lawyers argued, that Israel had good reason to carry out raids of hospitals across Gaza like Al-Shifa in Gaza City, for instance, and that it has allowed a sufficient amount of humanitarian aid into the region, when closer analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at Goldsmiths, University of London, finds in its report released this week that Israel’s lawyers misrepresented its evidence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In one instance, the group found that an image of a line of trucks carrying humanitarian aid that Israeli lawyers claimed were driving into Gaza was actually an image of trucks driving away from Gaza toward the Egypt-Israel border in order to be “checked” and likely dismissed by Israeli forces and protesters.
Using open-source satellite imagery, videos and 3D stills, the group found that, in all, Israel’s defense team incorrectly labeled, annotated or testified about nine pieces of visual evidence it submitted to the ICJ in its case last month in order to bolster their claims.
One photo presented by the Israeli legal team showed what they claimed was a rocket launch testing site for Palestinian forces next to a water desalination plant — but, according to Forensic Architecture, what Israeli lawyers labeled in the photo as the launch site actually aligns with craters left by the types of bombs that Israel has been dropping on Gaza.