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After Hamas’s Oct. 7 assault on Israel, South Africa’s international minister, Naledi Pandor, spoke by telephone with Hamas’s political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, and later needed to clarify that the discussions had been centered on offering humanitarian assist to Gaza. .
South Africa’s case towards Israel may generate a backlash globally and at residence. U.S. officers have supported Israel, calling the case meritless. And a few within the small however outspoken neighborhood of South African Jews, a gaggle that performed a key position within the anti-apartheid wrestle, have criticized their authorities over the genocide case.
Giving voice to these criticisms, Zev Krengel, the president of the South Africa Jewish Board of Deputies, known as it “an enormous betrayal.”
Mr. Krengel accused the South African authorities, led by the A.N.C., of hypocrisy, saying that it hadn’t pursued instances towards different international locations that had dedicated atrocities. When Sudan’s former president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, got here to South Africa for a summit in 2015, South African authorities refused to arrest him although he was wished on prices of genocide and battle crimes by the Worldwide Prison Courtroom.
“We’ve by no means seen the A.N.C. authorities extra excited than attempting to show the Jewish state is doing genocide,” Mr. Krengel stated.
Ronald Lamola, South Africa’s justice minister, stated the case was not an assault on Jews however was about urgently saving Palestinian lives. Greater than 23,000 folks have been killed in Israeli assaults in Gaza since Oct. 7, based on the Gazan well being ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel’s assaults got here after Hamas led an incursion that killed 1,200 folks, based on Israeli officers.
“We are able to’t are available in two or three years time when all the inhabitants can have been annihilated to say, ‘We remorse, we must always have stopped it,’” Mr. Lamola stated in an interview.
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