The International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled on Tuesday against Nicaragua’s request that it order Germany to halt arms sales to Israel.
The ICJ judges, by a vote of 15-to-1, argued that the circumstances presented to the court didn’t justify the exercise of its power to impose provisional measures against Germany.
The only judge to voted in favor of the request was Awn Shawkat al-Khasawneh, the judge selected by Nicaragua.
The court, however, refused Germany’s request to dismiss the case outright, finding that “there being no manifest lack of jurisdiction, it cannot accede to Germany’s request to remove the case from the Court’s docket.” The case could take years to move through the court.
Germany’s Foreign Office said on Twitter on Tuesday that it was “not a party to the conflict in the Middle East—on the contrary: We are committed day and night to a #TwoStateSolution. We are the largest donor of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians.”
Nicaragua submitted its request to the ICJ on March 1, arguing that Germany had violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention for failing “to prevent the genocide committed and being committed against the Palestinian people.”
The case was the latest in a bid at the ICJ, the United Nation’s main judicial body, to impose a ceasefire on Israel by international diktat. In January, the court rejected a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of committing genocide.
Although Israel’s defense forces make efforts to avoid civilian casualties, Palestinian propagandists continue to accuse Israel of “genocide,” an accusation accepted at face value by college protesters at anti-Israel campus rallies in the U.S.
Some, like Abraham Wyner, a professor of statistics and data science at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, have argued that the Hamas numbers upon which such accusations are based cannot be real.
“The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters,” he said.
