Commentarydimitrisvetsikas1969 / Pixabay
Three ICJ orders in 2024 required Israel to prevent genocidal acts and allow aid; a U.N. commission now finds none were followed.
Israel has ignored three binding International Court of Justice (ICJ) orders on Gaza for more than two years, a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded June 18, finding that it “continues to blatantly disregard” measures issued in January, March and May 2024 (A/HRC/62/CRP.2, para. 330). The finding is not just another entry in a long list of allegations against Israel. It is a demonstration, in real time, of the central weakness of international law as an enforcement system: courts can rule, but they cannot make anyone listen.
Three Rulings, No Enforcement
The ICJ’s first intervention came on Jan. 26, 2024, when the court found plausible the Palestinians’ asserted right to be protected from genocide and ordered Israel, under Article 41 of the ICJ Statute, to prevent genocidal acts and enable humanitarian aid. That order was binding the moment it was issued — a principle settled since LaGrand (Germany v. United States) in 2001. By March 28, with famine risk rising, the court strengthened the order, demanding unhindered delivery of food, water, and medical supplies. By May 24, facing Israel’s offensive in Rafah, the court ordered Israel to halt any Rafah operation that could inflict destructive conditions on Palestinians in Gaza.
More than two years later, the Commission’s new report documents continued civilian harm even after the October 2025 ceasefire, including killings near the ambiguously marked “yellow line” that the Commission found failed to provide meaningful civilian protection. Three binding rulings from the world’s highest court. The conduct they were meant to stop continued anyway.
A System Built Without Teeth
This is not a flaw unique to the Gaza proceedings; it is how the international legal system was built. Unlike domestic courts, which rely on police, contempt powers, and executive agencies to enforce judgments, the ICJ has no enforcement arm of its own. Under Article 94(1) of the UN Charter, member states are obligated to comply with ICJ rulings — but if they do not, the only recourse under Article 94(2) is the Security Council, which may act. It is under no obligation to.
That “may” carries enormous weight. And the Security Council was never built to act as a neutral enforcer. Under Article 27(3) of the Charter, any one of the five permanent members — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China — can block a resolution regardless of its merits. Throughout the Gaza conflict, ceasefire and civilian-protection resolutions repeatedly failed under the exercise, or threat, of the veto. The Commission’s own recommendation — that the Security Council “take concrete measures to ensure accountability” — calls on the only body with enforcement power while documenting, in the same report, that body’s repeated paralysis on the exact question before it.
Doctrine Versus Practice
None of this means international law applies different rules to different states. The Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions bind every state identically, and the ICJ does not use one legal standard for powerful states and another for weaker ones. What differs is not the law itself but the odds that a ruling against a state will actually be enforced — and those odds shift sharply depending on whether a permanent Security Council member is willing to let enforcement happen.
The clearest evidence of that gap is comparative. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine produced an International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin within about a year, alongside sweeping sanctions and asset freezes adopted within weeks. Israel has now faced an ICJ finding of plausible rights warranting protection under the Genocide Convention, ICC warrants for its prime minister and former defense minister, and a Commission of Inquiry conclusion that genocide is ongoing (A/HRC/62/CRP.2, para. 331) — met with no comparable sanctions and continued arms transfers, including a roughly $20 billion US package approved in August 2024. Two situations, similar legal findings, opposite enforcement outcomes. The doctrine of sovereign equality under Article 2(1) of the UN Charter remains untouched by any of this. Its practical application does not survive contact with a veto.
A Ceasefire That Did Not Change the Pattern
The October 2025 ceasefire might have been expected to close this gap, at least in fact if not in law. It did not. The Commission documents that in the months following the ceasefire, more than 100 children were killed near the so-called “yellow line” — a demarcation zone inside Gaza marked, according to the report, only by concrete barriers placed roughly 200 meters apart, with no fencing, warning signs, or safe corridors for civilians attempting to return home (A/HRC/62/CRP.2, paras. 36–40). A ceasefire that permits this kind of continued lethal enforcement of an unmarked line is not, in any legally meaningful sense, a cessation of hostilities. It is the same underlying conduct operating under a different label, and it illustrates precisely why judicial findings without an enforcement mechanism struggle to change behavior even after a formal diplomatic settlement.
Why This Matters Beyond Gaza
The stakes here extend past this conflict. Every time a binding international ruling goes unenforced because a permanent Security Council member shields the state in question, it teaches every other <a href="https://absafricatv.com/south-africa-returnees-find-shelter-at-opm-seek-government-support/” title=”South Africa Returnees Find Shelter At OPM, Seek Government Support”>government the same lesson: legal findings are survivable if the right ally is willing to run interference. That lesson does not stay contained to one region or one dispute. It shapes how the next aggressor calculates the cost of ignoring international law altogether — and it is a lesson available to study by anyone watching how Gaza has unfolded over the past two and a half years.
It is also, notably, not the conclusion the Commission itself draws about the underlying law. Its report does not argue that the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, or the law of armed conflict need to be rewritten or expanded. It argues instead that the existing rules were repeatedly and knowingly violated, and that the mechanisms meant to compel compliance — the Security Council chief among them — proved unable to do so. That distinction matters for anyone trying to draw the right lesson from this conflict. The problem is not a gap in what the law requires. It is a gap in what anyone can do about a state that decides the law does not apply to it.
Fixing this does not require new treaties. The Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, and the law of armed conflict already say what is required; the Commission’s report does not call for new norms, only enforcement of the existing ones. What would help is narrower and more achievable: wider use of universal jurisdiction by domestic courts to prosecute individuals regardless of where the underlying conduct occurred; consistent multilateral sanctions regimes that do not depend on Security Council consensus; and continued political pressure for Security Council reform limiting the veto in cases of mass-atrocity findings, an idea with longstanding, and growing, support among UN member states.
Until then, the distance between what the ICJ has ordered and what has actually happened in Gaza will keep serving as the clearest evidence available of international law’s central unresolved problem: the rules are sound, but nothing requires anyone to follow them once a powerful ally decides otherwise.
Sahil Najar is a final-year law student at the Central University of Kashmir, Ganderbal in India.
Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST’s editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.
