What happened
It matters, for accurately reading this entry, what these ICJ orders are and are not. Provisional (interim) measures are not a final verdict — the Court explicitly did not rule, in any of the three orders, that Israel had committed or was committing genocide. What it did find, unanimously in the January 2024 order and by strong majorities in the ones that followed, was that South Africa's claims were plausible enough that Palestinians in Gaza faced a real and imminent risk of irreparable harm under the Genocide Convention, which was enough to justify emergency measures while the case proceeds. A final judgment on the merits — whether genocide actually occurred — will not arrive for years, and Israel disputes the premise of the case entirely, arguing its actions constitute a lawful, if imperfectly executed, war against a genocidal terrorist organisation embedded in a civilian population.
That said, the escalating nature of the three orders is itself notable. The Court does not typically issue repeat emergency orders in a single case within months of each other; it did so here because, in its own assessment, conditions on the ground had deteriorated in ways that made its original January order insufficient — first on food access in March, then on the specific Rafah operation in May, after over a million displaced Palestinians had sheltered there. Israel proceeded with limited operations in Rafah despite the order, arguing its actions did not constitute the full-scale offensive the Court's language addressed — a distinction South Africa and human rights groups rejected.
The case sits alongside, but is legally distinct from, the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant (a separate court, addressing individual criminal responsibility for specific war crimes and crimes against humanity, rather than state responsibility for genocide). Both proceedings are ongoing as of 2026, and neither has produced a final, binding determination of Israel's or its leaders' ultimate legal culpability — but both represent the most serious international legal exposure any Israeli government has faced.