PA lawyer tells ICJ that Israel’s rule of West Bank, East Jerusalem is ‘illegal occupation’

Speaking for the Palestinian Authority in the International Court of Justice hearings today, international lawyer Paul Reichler presents arguments asserting that Israel’s 56-year-long rule over the West Bank and East Jerusalem amounts to an “illegal occupation” of the territory.

Reichler cites the UN Charter as well as numerous UN Security Council resolutions including UNSC resolutions 242, 478, and 2334 in arguing that the acquisition of territory by force is illegal, and quotes comments by numerous senior Israel officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in which they stated that they wish to annex parts or all of the West Bank.

Reichler describes the residence of some 700,000 Israelis in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem neighborhoods as “a vast colonial enterprise” in which he alleges that Israel has “implanted settlers” as part of a goal of permanent annexation.

He also shows the court a picture of a map of the region used by Netanyahu in a speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2023 where Israel is depicted as including all the territory west of the Jordan River with no demarcation at all of the West Bank as evidence that Israel seeks to “eliminate all traces of Palestine.”

He cites Netanyahu’s declared goal from 2019 of annexing the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, as well as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich saying that it was “a national ambition” to control the West Bank from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea,” which, he said, “was an established fact and not open to negotiation.”

Says Reichler, “The evidence is indisputable. Under an umbrella of a prolonged military occupation, [Israel] has been steadily annexing Palestinian territory and the objective is the permanent acquisition of this territory and to exercise of sovereignty over it in defiance of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.

“Senior Israeli officials admit their objective is sovereignty over all the territory over the green line… there is no reason not to take them at their word because their deeds are consistent with them.”