Name: Top EU diplomat says EU has to choose between supporting Israel or rule of law - BBC News
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The European Union's top diplomat says the bloc will have to make a choice between supporting

Israel or international institutions and the rule of law.

Yousef Baral was speaking after the UN's highest court ruled that Israel had to halt its military offensive in Rafah in response to a case brought by South Africa.

They've accused Israel of violating the UN Genocide Convention in Gaza.

Israel has said no power on earth will stop it going after Hamas.

Lucy Williamson reports now from Jerusalem.

Israel's soldiers have been ordered to push into Rafah.

Israel's leaders have been ordered to stop.

Footage from both sides shows the fighting as Israeli troops edge closer to the city centre.

But the UN's highest court today focused on civilians, those still there, and the 800,000 who have fled.

Israel must immediately halt its military offensive and any other action in the Rafah governorate which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Israel says this is a precise and limited operation.

But satellite pictures of Rafah show the destruction less than two weeks after the assault.

Today Israel's army said it had recovered the bodies of three hostages from northern

Gaza, Michel Nissenbaum, Oriane Hernandez and Hanane Blanca.

One member of the war cabinet said Israel had to keep fighting to return its hostages and safeguard its citizens and would continue to act according to international law.

Foreign criticism of Israel's actions in Gaza is growing.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or Bibi as he's known, is comfortable being seen as the staunch defender of Israel's security under siege.

It's very easy to sit miles away and criticise what's happening.

I don't really care about what people are thinking about us.

You can see that if we do care about what people think of us, we should stop the war.

Therefore it's really important for us to have support and we don't get it.

Salwa al-Masri, sheltering in a tent on the coast north of Rafah, had little faith in the court's power to change her situation.

They shouldn't say one thing and do something different.

Today they say they want to stop the war, but the massacres are only increasing.

The Rafah offensive has blocked key aid routes through southern Gaza.

Supplies brought in via a new US pier quickly looted.

The court today ordered Israel to reopen the Rafah crossing.

New battle lines in this war, driven by promises on both sides to protect civilians.

OK, let's speak now to Joel Beynon, who is the Professor of Middle East History at Stanford

Hello and welcome to the programme, Professor.

First off, will this ruling, just the latest going against Israel in the past week, make any mark on their next actions?

It won't make an immediate difference because all of the Israeli government officials who are responsible decision makers have said clearly they aren't going to obey the ruling.

So whatever it says won't make a difference in the short run.

We had the ICC arrest warrants, we've now got this.

We had the declaration by three countries that they would recognise, it was Spain, Norway and Ireland, isn't it, that they would unilaterally recognise a Palestine state.

Where is all this heading in the long term?

So since October 7th, we've seen an accelerating trend in the international community to really for the first time take measures that begin to hold Israel accountable.

There's also the Security Council resolution that the United States abstained on rather than veto.

So Israel is becoming gradually more and more isolated.

The United States, to the extent that it without reservation supports Israel, as it has been doing, is also becoming more and more isolated.

In the medium to long run, this will ultimately impose serious constraints on what Israel and the United States can do.

Algeria, you mentioned the Security Council there.

Algeria, of course, the only Arab state on the Security Council.

Is there anything that they could be doing to push this matter on?

They could be doing many things, but by and large, most of the Arab countries have never really stood up to support Palestinian rights.

Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia are all authoritarian Sunni states which are effectively in an alignment with Israel in a front against Iran and its regional proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen.

And that overrides all of the popular sentiment that does exist very publicly in the Arab world in support of the Palestinian people.

What would override Benjamin Netanyahu with his insistence that he's not going to stop?

Well, Israel, at least for Jews, is still a democracy.

There were, in the months before the Hamas October 7th attack, demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of Israelis every week demanding ultimately that Netanyahu resign, and those demonstrations have in the last month or so resumed and have become quite large.

There'll be another one tomorrow evening as well – or actually, it's this evening if you're in Europe, Saturday evening.

There's some possibility that that kind of public pressure will erode the legitimacy of the government and force an early election or force the members of the opposition who joined the war cabinet to resign.

Joel Bainen, Professor Joel Bainen, thank you very much indeed.

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Top EU diplomat says EU has to choose between supporting Israel or rule of law - BBC News

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