Israel’s 57-year-old occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank is illegal under international law, the UN’s highest court said on Friday, casting the Jewish state’s conduct towards Palestinians living under its military’s control as a decades-long violation of their rights.
In a series of findings, the ICJ ruled that almost every aspect of Israeli policy in the West Bank was illegal, from the creation and support of sprawling settlements to the application of discriminatory laws and of Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem.
“Israel’s continued presence in the occupied territories is unlawful,” said the opinion backed by a majority of judges at the International Court of Justice. “It should be brought to an end as rapidly as possible.”
It said Israel should dismantle its settlement infrastructure and “evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory”, a core demand of Palestinians who seek to establish their nation on the same land.
The opinion, in response to a 2022 request by the UN General Assembly, found that none of the legal architecture of Israel’s occupation complied with international humanitarian law, in a damning — if toothless — indictment of how Israel has interpreted its obligations towards the Palestinians under the Geneva Conventions.
While dealing a diplomatic blow to Israel, the advisory opinion to the General Assembly will have little immediate impact given that it is non-binding. Israel is already ignoring one from 2004 that declared its separation barrier — which took swaths of the West Bank into Israeli territory — to be illegal.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on X: “The Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land — neither in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria.
“No false decision in The Hague will distort this historical truth, and likewise the legality of Israeli settlement in all the territories of our homeland cannot be disputed.”
The West Bank of the Jordan river is known as Judea and Samaria by Israelis, a reference to its biblical name.
Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a champion of its settlements policy in the West Bank, said on X that the best response to the ICJ would be to annex the entire territory. “The answer to The Hague — sovereignty now,” he wrote.
Israel did not fully represent itself at the hearings. Its ambassador to the Netherlands, where the hearings took place in The Hague, wrote last year that the country declined to answer questions that “reflected a severe injustice and imbalance”.
The Palestinian Authority, which has limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank, welcomed the ruling as “timely and sorely needed”.
“The Palestinian people have endured unbearable suffering and injustice for decades,” said the PA’s ministry of foreign affairs. “Israel’s colonial, expansionist and genocidal policies are on full, horrific display before the world.”
All elements of the ICJ’s findings were backed by a majority of the court’s 15 judges, though the exact number varied for different rulings.
The advisory opinion, requested before the war between Israel and Hamas was triggered by the Palestinian militant group’s October 7 attack, is one of three separate international legal challenges that Israel is fighting.
South Africa has alleged in a different case, also before the ICJ, that Israel is engaged in a genocide in Gaza, where almost 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to officials in the strip.
Separately, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister over the war in Gaza, including on allegations of using starvation as a weapon of war and “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population”.
Taken together, the three legal actions represent the gravest recent challenge to Israel’s claim that its military acts within the restraints of the laws of war, and that its long-running occupation of the Palestinian territories is justified by security concerns.
The ICJ rejected the thrust of those arguments, saying that “the sustained abuse by Israel of its position as an occupying power . . . violates fundamental principles of international law and renders Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful”.
Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, after wresting control of the territories from Jordan in the 1967 war. It soon signalled approval for UN resolution 242, which offered it the possibility of peace with its neigbouring states in exchange for withdrawal from “territories occupied in the recent conflict”.
With Egypt and Jordan, Israel was able to achieve that compromise, dubbed “land for peace”. However, when it came to the Palestinian territories, it annexed East Jerusalem, in a move rejected by the international community, and has since built more than a hundred settlements in the West Bank and confiscated tens of thousands of acres of land.
The Jewish population of the area now exceeds 700,000, living in walled-off settlements nestled within and near a Palestinian population of about 3mn.
The court said this transfer of Israeli citizens into the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel’s financial and military support of the settlements was also inconsistent with international law and the Geneva Conventions.
In recent years, Israeli and international human rights groups say the Israeli military’s administration of the West Bank has crossed the threshold into apartheid.
They have cited the operation of separate courts for Israelis and Palestinians, who are tried under military law with a conviction rate of more than 99 per cent, and the imposition of a residence permit system and segregated roads for Palestinians only.
The court said these policies were in breach of an international agreement against racial segregation and apartheid, called the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
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