By Islamuddin Sajid
ISLAMABAD (AA) - Pakistan on Friday said Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unlawful and that it must stop.
Addressing the International Court of Justice, Law Minister Ahmed Irfan Aslam said Pakistan has been led to “the conclusion that Israel's occupation is unlawful and unlawfulness must have consequences.”
For the first time since its establishment in 1948, Israel is currently being tried before the International Court of Justice, the highest judicial body in the UN, on charges of committing the crime of "genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza.
Criticizing the Israeli settler policy, Aslam said that through this policy Tel Aviv creates irreversible facts on the ground which make it difficult to bring an end to its prolonged occupation.
"Its policies and practices of occupation deny the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination and amount to systematic racial discrimination and serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights," he said, urging the UN top court to take this seriously.
He said Israel’s ongoing actions are against international law and seek to acquire Palestinian territory while killing and displacing its people.
The top UN court is currently hearing oral statements by states on South Africa’s case against Israel over its war on Palestine, where the death toll since Oct. 7 is rapidly approaching 30,000 since Tel Aviv launched attacks on the besieged enclave of Gaza.
Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7 cross-border attack by the Palestinian group Hamas which killed some 1,200 Israelis.
Besides injuring some 60,000 people, the Israeli war on Gaza has pushed 85% of the territory's population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave's infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
Hostilities have continued unabated, however, and aid deliveries remain woefully insufficient to address the humanitarian catastrophe.