ICJ likely to find Israel guilty of genocide, says senator

Elizabeth Warren also repeated other Palestinian propaganda in a speech in a mosque in Massachusetts.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A Democratic senator said Friday that she thinks the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will eventually find that Israel committed genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Taking questions after a speech in a Boston mosque, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a Democrat with a long anti-Israel voting record, was asked what she thought of the ICJ ruling in January that said there was a “plausible” risk of Israel committing such a crime during its war with Hamas.

“There’s going to be a long and involved debate over what constitutes genocide, when you ask a legal question,” she answered at first. “For me, it is far more important to say what Israel is doing is wrong. And it is wrong. It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend to your will, it is wrong to drop 2000-pound bombs, in densely populated civilian areas.”

The senator did not bring up Israeli statistics that it has allowed over 250,000 tons of food and nearly 20,000 tons of medical equipment into the coastal enclave to date. She also declined to point out that Hamas commits a war crime by deliberately hiding its military forces among the civilian population, and that Israel has made every effort to protect civilians, by warning noncombatants to flee incipient battle zones and facilitating their escape.

Instead, when pressed whether she herself thought the war constituted genocide, she responded, “If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide. And they have ample evidence to do so,” she said.

The senator’s claim flies in the face of one of her country’s experts on urban warfare.

Maj. (ret.) John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, noted in an opinion piece in Newsweek in January that Israel “has implemented more measures to prevent civilian casualties than any other military in history.

This was true, he wrote, even though “No military in modern history has faced over 30,000 urban defenders in more than seven cities using human shields and hiding in hundreds of miles of underground networks purposely built under civilian sites, while holding hundreds of hostages.”

Israel, he added, “has taken precautionary measures even the United States did not do during its recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

While supporting Israel’s war against Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the terror organization’s October 7 invasion in which its men slaughtered 1,200 people, by early January, the progressive lawmaker was already suggesting that “When it comes to military aid to Israel, the U.S. cannot write a blank check for a right-wing government that’s demonstrated an appalling disregard for Palestinian lives.”

Following the IDF’s accidental killing of seven aid workers in Gaza, Warren last week told CNN that she would try to prevent the sale of additional jet fighters to Israel.

“I think it is clear that Congress has a responsibility to act,” she said. “We have legal tools here. And as I said, we cannot approve the sale of arms to a country that is in violation of our own laws on this.”

The IDF apologized profusely for the errant airstrike, which stemmed, it said, from a violation of standard operating procedure, and fired two of the senior officers involved.

Elizabeth Warrengenocide caseHuman shieldsICJIsrael-Hamas war