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UN must act on ICJ ruling - SA; Israel’s growth will slow heavily as war drags on - IMF

UN must act on ICJ ruling - SA; Israel’s growth will slow heavily as war drags on - IMF
Bloomberg
By Bloomberg
31 Jan 2024
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South Africa wants the United Nations Security Council to outline measures that it will take to enforce an International Court of Justice’s interim ruling against Israel as it seeks to sustain international pressure to bring an end to hostilities in the Gaza Strip.

Israel’s economic growth will slow substantially in 2024 as the war with Hamas in Gaza drags on, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Iran urged the US to use diplomacy to ease tensions in the Middle East, as Tehran braces for a military response to a deadly attack on a US base over the weekend.

The Israeli military said it was engaged in its fiercest fighting in Gaza yet in the southern city of Khan Younis, where it hopes to kill or capture Hamas leaders presumed to be hiding in tunnels with hostages. 

South Africa seeks UN resolution to enforce Israel court ruling


South Africa wants the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to outline measures that it will take to enforce the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ’s) interim ruling against Israel as it seeks to sustain international pressure to bring an end to hostilities in the Gaza Strip.

The UN’s top court on Friday said that Israel — accused by South Africa of genocide amid its crackdown on Hamas — must act to prevent Palestinians from being killed or injured, but stopped short of demanding an immediate ceasefire. 

Algeria, a non-permanent member of the UNSC, has written to the council requesting an urgent meeting to discuss the court’s ruling, which is expected to be held on 31 January. António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, said he would also notify the UNSC of the court’s provisional order.  

“The ruling must speak to the conscience of other nations and members of the Security Council,” said South Africa’s Justice Minister, Ronald Lamola. “They must respond in compliance with the order.” 

Read more on the ICJ’s ruling:



If a Security Council intervention is blocked by the US, which has been consistent in its support of Israel, South Africa will approach the UN General Assembly, which has previously voted in favour of a ceasefire, said Lamola, who led the country’s delegation to the ICJ.  

The ICJ ordered Israel to report back within a month on measures it had taken to comply with the ruling. South Africa will also be compiling its own observations, to present to the court, Lamola said. 

Israel’s growth will slow heavily as war drags on, says IMF


Israel’s economic growth will slow substantially in 2024 as the war with Hamas in Gaza drags on, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Gross domestic product will increase by far less than the fund’s pre-war estimate of 3%, according to Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas.

“We’re going to be well below that,” he said in a briefing with reporters on Monday, adding that the IMF hadn’t yet published a specific number.

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The Bank of Israel’s growth projection for 2024 is 2%, while the finance ministry’s estimate is lower at 1.6%.

There are already plenty of signs the $520-billion economy has been hit. The finance ministry said GDP probably contracted by about 20% quarter-on-quarter between October and December.

Activity in many consumer sectors has slumped while businesses are struggling with a shortage of workers — hundreds of thousands were called up as army reservists, although a large proportion has now been released.

The fiscal deficit is set to surge to 6.6% of GDP this year.

UN agency’s alleged Hamas links create aid risk for Gaza


When Einat Wilf was a member of Israel’s parliament a dozen years ago, her committee was briefed on the close relations between Hamas and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main UN agency in Gaza. The information, she says, was then suppressed.

“Israel would actually hide that intelligence,” Wilf, a researcher who was a member of the left-leaning Labor Party, said by phone. “Israel knew it would hurt UNRWA. It was UNRWA’s biggest protector.”

Those days are over. Since last week, the Israeli government has been sharing detailed allegations against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, contending that 10% of its staff are members of militant groups Hamas or Islamic Jihad and that 13 of its employees took part in the 7 October massacre that set off the current war. 

This has led at least 16 countries, including the US, the main funder, to suspend their support for the agency. It says continuing to do so would ruin its ability to stave off disease and starvation for more than two million Gazans as Israel carries out its punishing war against Hamas. It also could end its longstanding relief efforts for Palestinians in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

“I urge countries who have suspended their funding to reconsider their decisions before UNRWA is forced to suspend its humanitarian response,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the agency’s commissioner-general. “The lives of people in Gaza depend on this support and so does regional stability.” 

In the US, Representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, is leading a group of colleagues who are calling for Lazzarini to step down because they don’t trust him to keep the agency free of extremism. 

Hearings are being held in Congress and at the UN on UNRWA’s future at a time when, whatever its flaws, its infrastructure and its thousands of workers are among the few things standing between the inhabitants of Gaza and doom. 

At the UN, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters that “UNRWA plays a critical role in providing life-saving assistance to Palestinians, including essential food, and medicine and shelter.” But, she said, “We need to see fundamental changes before we can resume providing funding directly to UNRWA.” 

UNRWA is a unique UN agency in that it is essentially all Palestinian. Set up in 1949 to aid those displaced by the establishment of Israel, it has granted refugee status to all their descendants as well. No other refugee group has such a UN status, which is one reason Israel’s government wants to end its existence: It hopes to start limiting the number of people in the world who claim to be refugees from its founding, now about 14 million.  

Read more: UNRWA funding boycott threatens Gaza’s aid lifeline: QuickTake

However, some within Israel’s defence establishment, especially those responsible for overseeing the provision of food and supplies to Gaza, are raising questions about the timing of the attack on UNRWA.

As one former officer put it, some of those in charge of humanitarian aid believe that, practically speaking, there’s no alternative to working with UNRWA, especially now.  

Amos Gilead, a former senior Israeli defence official, said he had numerous dealings with UNRWA and despite its hostility to Israel, the best way forward now was to fire those with links to Hamas and continue to work with the agency to get aid to Palestinians. 

But others, especially those in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, disagree. 

“UNRWA is Hamas,” Amichai Chikli, minister of diaspora affairs, and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said at a briefing for reporters on Tuesday. “We ourselves will be in charge of humanitarian issues. If we can do it with UN forces who are not UNRWA, or international organisations, this is the best option. If not, the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] itself, till the war ends, can take control.” 

Government spokesperson Eylon Levy said at a daily war briefing on Tuesday that Israel wants UNRWA defunded, Lazzarini fired, an investigation started and what Israel considers the radical education and agenda promulgated by UNRWA to be stopped.  

“UNRWA is part of the problem, not part of the solution,” he said. “It is a Hamas front and it’s time to put it behind.” 

Iran urges diplomacy as US weighs response to deadly attack


Iran urged the US to use diplomacy to ease tensions in the Middle East, as Tehran braced for a military response to a deadly attack on a US base over the weekend.

The foreign minister of the Islamic Republic said “active” diplomacy was under way to find a political solution to the war in Gaza and the regional fallout, without elaborating. 

“The White House knows very well” that the way to end the war “and the current crisis in the region is political,” Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in a post on X.

The comments came as the US weighs how to retaliate against a deadly attack on a base in Jordan that killed three US soldiers and injured dozens. President Joe Biden blamed Tehran-backed militias in neighbouring Syria and Iraq and said he’d respond “at a time and in a manner of our choosing”.

Read more:



Iran denied involvement in the strike, which was the first to kill Americans since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in October.

Many Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have said the attack shows Biden’s been too soft on Iran.

The US and Iran don’t have formal diplomatic ties but have exchanged messages about the crisis since October, sometimes through the Swiss embassy in Tehran. Both sides say they want to de-escalate the situation while blaming the other for inflaming it. The US says Iran’s support for regional militias is fuelling tensions, while Tehran says Washington must put pressure on Israel to end its military offensive in Gaza.

Hamas militants attacked Israel on 7 October from Gaza, triggering the war and roiling the wider region. Since then, US bases in Iraq and Syria have come under regular fire from Iran-supported groups. Hezbollah, also backed by Iran, is exchanging fire with Israeli forces almost daily across the Israel-Lebanon border.

Read more: Deadly attack near Syria renews focus on US bases in Middle East

The Houthis, meanwhile, have caused mayhem in the shipping world with attacks on vessels around the southern Red Sea. They say they won’t back down until Israel pulls out of Gaza, despite the US and UK launching missiles on their positions in Yemen. 

“This is an incredibly volatile time in the Middle East,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday. “I would argue that we’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973,” he said, referring to the year in which Israel fought the Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria. 

Israel military in fierce fighting in Khan Younis 


The Israeli military said it was engaged in its fiercest fighting in Gaza yet in the southern city of Khan Younis, where it hopes to kill or capture Hamas leaders presumed to be hiding in tunnels with hostages.

In a briefing, an Israeli military intelligence officer said that of Hamas’ five fighting brigades, Israeli troops have killed or captured most of the commanders of two of them, both based in the north of Gaza. 

The focus is now on the Khan Younis brigade, where Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, chief military spokesperson, said in a press conference on Monday night that troops have “killed hundreds of terrorists and arrested more than 300 people suspected of terror activities.” Hagari also said that for the first time, troops were now fighting in the tunnel network that runs beneath Gaza. 

Khan Younis is Gaza’s second-largest city and is packed with tens of thousands of people. It is strategically important as it’s where Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and military chief Mohammed Deif are from, and where they’re believed by Israel to be hiding. 

Four months in, with such leaders still at large and much of Hamas’s military infrastructure still intact, fighting in Gaza has been tougher than many Israeli military officials anticipated. Roughly 220 Israeli soldiers have been killed. But leaders insist they are making significant progress.

The intelligence officer said about 9,000 Hamas fighters had been killed out of an estimated army of 35,000. On Monday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told soldiers something similar, saying, “A quarter of the Hamas terrorists have been killed and at least another quarter wounded.”

More than 26,000 people have been killed in the Gaza war so far, with the vast majority being women and children, according to Hamas. It is not possible to independently verify any of these numbers.

The intelligence officer said Israel was still many months away from achieving its goals, which include capturing or destroying munitions and weapons, and rendering Hamas military bases and tunnels inoperative. Accomplishing that will take all of 2024 — and perhaps longer, he said.

In addition, the command structure of the two remaining brigades, one in the centre of Gaza and the other in the southern city of Rafah, were still intact, he said. Each brigade is led by between 70 and 150 commanders, and killing or capturing them is vital to dismantling these units, he added.   

One of the most confounding issues for Israel is that Hamas continues to fire rockets into the country, although far fewer than before. A barrage was launched on Monday, with some reaching Tel Aviv. While residents took cover in bomb shelters, they were intercepted by the Iron Dome system.   

Deadly attack near Syria renews focus on US bases


A deadly drone attack on US troops in Jordan is reigniting a debate about the US’s military presence across the Middle East as the Israel-Hamas war prompts attacks by Iran-backed militias across the region. 

The US has about 47,000 troops stationed in the Middle East across a range of bases and regional commands, according to the US government and estimates by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Although most of those are stationed at big bases in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, many thousands more are scattered around smaller outposts.

Those include personnel in Iraq and Jordan, which hosts a small base known as Tower 22 where the three Americans were killed over the weekend. The Pentagon said there have been 165 attacks on US positions in the region since mid-October: 66 in Iraq, 98 in Syria and the one in Jordan on Sunday. 

While some of the sites of US power projection are obvious, many of the operations are smaller, and in some cases aren’t even officially acknowledged. 

The US military says it maintains tens of thousands of troops across the region to engage in counter-terrorism operations against Islamic State, training local forces in places such as Iraq and more broadly projecting US power and deterring Iran. 

On Monday, the White House made it clear that the US wasn’t about to pull troops out of the region. 

“These troops were conducting a vital mission in the region aimed at helping us work with partners to counter Isis,” John Kirby, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, told reporters, referring to a name used for Islamic State. “And even as the Defense Department gathers more information about the attack, that mission must and will continue.” DM
Read more in Daily Maverick: Israel-Palestine War

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