The United Nation’s top court has ruled Israel’s settlements in the Palestinian territories are illegal, and they must be removed immediately.
“The State of Israel is under the obligation to bring an end to its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” ICJ President Nawaf Salam said when he delivered the court’s findings on Friday, stressing that the “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is illegal.”
The opinion is merely advisory and is not legally binding. The court specifically aimed to provide its view on Israel’s policies and practices as well as the legal status of the settlements, the BBC reported.
The court in May demanded Israel “immediately halt its military offensive” against Hamas in Rafah, the Palestinian terrorist group’s final stronghold in the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly rejected the court’s conclusion, arguing in a statement posted on X that “Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land, including in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in Judea and Samaria, our historic homeland.
“No absurd opinion in The Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.”
The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued a longer, more detailed statement through its spokesperson Oren Marmorstein, who posted on social media platform X that “Israel rejects the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that was published today regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
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“Unfortunately, the Court’s opinion is fundamentally wrong,” Marmorstein wrote. “It mixes politics and law. It injects the politics of the corridors of the U.N. in New York into the courtrooms of the ICJ in The Hague.
Nawaf Salam, judge and president of the International Court of Justice, second from right, delivers a non-binding ruling on the legal consequences of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem at the International Court of Justice in The Hague July 19, 2024. (Nick Gammon/AFP via Getty Images)
“The opinion is completely detached from the reality of the Middle East: While Hamas, Iran and other terrorist elements are attacking Israel from seven fronts … with the aim of obliterating it, and in the aftermath of the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, the opinion ignores the atrocities that took place on October 7, as well as the security imperative of Israel to defend its territory and its citizens,” Marmostein continued.
“It should be emphasized that the opinion is blatantly one-sided,” Marmostein added. “It ignores the past: The historical rights of the State of Israel and the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.
Two Israeli Cabinet members issued a rebuttal to American criticism of settlement construction in the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria in Israel. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
“It is detached from the present: from the reality on the ground and the agreements between the parties,” he stressed. “And it is dangerous for the future: it distances the parties from the only possible solution, which is direct negotiations.”
Members of the diplomatic corps react as they attend a non-binding ruling on the legal consequences of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem at the International Court of Justice in The Hague July 19, 2024. (Nick Gammon/AFP via Getty Images)
Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president at Human Rights Voices, told Fox News Digital the court’s opinion “literally throws out the Oslo Accords and U.N. Security Council resolutions.”
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This picture taken July 30, 2020, from the Mount of the Olives shows a view of an Israeli flag flying in Jerusalem with the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock seen in the background. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)
“It is impossible to overstate the legal perversion from this U.N. Court,” Bayefsky said. “It was read out by its president, who is a politician from Lebanon (whose name was on the ballot to be the prime minister of Lebanon in the last two elections), a country that doesn’t even recognize Israel’s right to exist. Incredibly, the court openly states it didn’t need to find any specific facts in violation of international law before reaching its conclusions, including before making the slanderous claim that Israel is guilty of the crime against humanity of apartheid. It took the court all of four mini-paragraphs to reach the apartheid conclusion.
“The U.N. and its kangaroo court says it knows best — the same U.N. that today is controlled by a vicious antisemitic majority, elects the judges and chooses the poison, in this case, legal farce — which, make no mistake, has one goal: to devastate and destroy the Jewish state.”
Israel already suffered a legal blow from the International Criminal Court, a separate legal governing body in the Netherlands, in which Prosecutor Karim Khan filed applications for arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, in addition to leaders of Hamas.
The State Department did not respond to a Fox News Digital request for comment by the time of publication.