Israeli President Denounces South Africa Genocide Filing, as Blinken Says Nothing

In their joint remarks in Tel Aviv before going into his meeting today with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Israeli President Isaac Herzog denounced South Africa’s petition before the International Court of Justice charging Israel with committing genocide in Gaza. “There is nothing more atrocious and preposterous than this claim,” Herzog said, reported the State Department transcript. “Actually our enemies, the Hamas, in their charter, call for the destruction and annihilation of the state of Israel—the only nation-state of the Jewish people. The convention against genocide was enacted by the international community following the worst atrocities of humankind—the Shoah, the Holocaust, which was aimed specifically against the Jews, the Jewish people, in order to eliminate the Jewish race, the Jewish people. In Hamas’s charter it’s almost identical in many, many ways.”