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THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Accused of committing genocide against Palestinians, Israel insisted at the United Nations’ highest court Friday that its war in Gaza was a legitimate defense of its people and that it was Hamas militants who were guilty of genocide.

Israel described the allegations leveled by South Africa as hypocritical and said one of the biggest cases ever to come before an international court reflected a world turned upside down. Israeli leaders defend their air and ground offensive in Gaza as a legitimate response to Hamas’ October 7 attack, when militants stormed through Israeli communities, killing some 1,200 people and taking around 250 hostages.

Israeli legal advisor Tal Becker told a packed auditorium at the ornate Palace of Peace in The Hague that the country is fighting a “war it did not start and did not want.”

“In these circumstances, there can hardly be a charge more false and more malevolent than the allegation against Israel of genocide,” he added, noting that the horrible suffering of civilians in war was not enough to level that charge.

On Friday afternoon, Germany said it wants to intervene in the proceedings on Israel’s behalf, saying there was “no basis whatsoever” for an accusation of genocide against Israel.

“Hamas terrorists brutally attacked, tortured, killed and kidnapped innocent people in Israel,” German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said in a statement. “Since then, Israel has been defending itself against the inhumane attack by Hamas.”

Under the court’s rules, if Germany files a declaration of intervention in the case, it will be able to make legal arguments on behalf of Israel.

Germany would be allowed to intervene at the merits phase of the case to address how the genocide convention, drawn up in 1948 following World War II, should be interpreted, according to international lawyer Balkees Jarrah, associate director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch.

“That would come after the court issues its decision on South Africa’s request for urgent measures to protect the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Jarrah told The Associated Press from The Hague, where she attended the ICJ hearings.

Germany’s support for Israel carries some symbolic significance given its Nazi history.

Hebestreit said Germany “sees itself as particularly committed to the Convention against Genocide.” He added: “We firmly oppose political instrumentalization.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the announcement, saying the gesture “touches all of Israel’s citizens.”

South African lawyers asked the court Thursday to order an immediate halt to Israeli military operations in the besieged coastal territory that is home to 2.3 million Palestinians. A decision on that request will probably take weeks, and the full case is likely to last years — and it’s unclear if Israel would follow any court orders.

On Friday, Israel focused on the brutality of the October 7 attacks, presenting chilling video and audio to a hushed audience.

“They tortured children in front of parents and parents in front of children, burned people, including infants alive, and systematically raped and mutilated scores of women, men and children,” Becker said.

South Africa’s request for an immediate halt to the Gaza fighting, he said, amounts to an attempt to prevent Israel from defending itself against that assault.

Even when acting in self-defense, countries are required by international law to follow the rules of war, and judges must decide if Israel has.

As two days of hearings ended Friday, ICJ President Joan E. Donoghue said the court would rule on the request for urgent measures “as soon as possible.”

Israel often boycotts international tribunals and U.N. investigations, saying they are unfair and biased. But this time, Israeli leaders took the rare step of sending a high-level legal team — a sign of how seriously they regard the case and likely their fear that any court order to halt operations would be a major blow to the country’s international standing.

Still, Becker dismissed the accusations as crude and attention-seeking.

“We live at a time when words are cheap in an age of social media and identity politics. The temptation to reach for the most outrageous term to vilify and demonize has become, for many, irresistible,” he said.

In a statement from New York, Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan called the case a “new moral low” and said that by taking it on, “the U.N. and its institutions have become weapons in service of terrorist organizations.”

Becker said the charges Israel is facing should be leveled at Hamas, which seeks Israel’s destruction and which the U.S. and Western allies consider a terrorist group.

“If there have been acts that may be characterized as genocidal, then they have been perpetrated against Israel,” Becker said.

More than 23,000 people in Gaza have been killed during Israel’s military campaign, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. That toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Nearly 85% of Gaza’s people have been driven their homes, a quarter of the enclave’s residents face starvation, and much of northern Gaza has been reduced to rubble.

South Africa says this amounts to genocide and is part of decades of Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

“The scale of destruction in Gaza, the targeting of family homes and civilians, the war being a war on children, all make clear that genocidal intent is both understood and has been put into practice. The articulated intent is the destruction of Palestinian life,” said lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, adding that several leading politicians had made dehumanizing comments about people in Gaza.

The Palestinian Authority’s foreign ministry welcomed the case, saying in a written statement that South Africa “delivered unequivocal evidence that Israel is deliberately and systematically violating its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”

Israel says that it takes measures to protect civilians, such as issuing evacuation orders ahead of strikes. It blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll, saying the group uses residential areas to stage attacks and for other military purposes.

The case also strikes at the heart of both Israel’s and South Africa’s national identities.

Israel was founded as a Jewish state in the wake of the Nazis’ slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II. South Africa’s governing party, meanwhile, has long compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank to its own history under the apartheid regime of white minority rule, which restricted most Black people to “homelands.”

The world court, which rules on disputes between nations, has never judged a country to be responsible for genocide. The closest it came was in 2007, when it ruled that Serbia “violated the obligation to prevent genocide” in the July 1995 massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica. 

The Iran-backed Houthis vowed Friday to continue attacking ships in the Red Sea following U.S. and British retaliatory strikes in Yemen. U.S. President Joe Biden said he would respond accordingly. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara reports.

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

WASHINGTON — When U.S. and U.K. warships and aircraft launched waves of missiles at Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen early Friday in Sanaa, it capped weeks of warnings to the group to cease their drone and missile attacks against commercial vessels in the Red Sea or face severe consequences.

Previously the U.S. had withheld striking back, reflecting larger U.S. concerns about upending the shaky truce in Yemen and triggering a wider conflict in the region. But on Tuesday the Houthis launched their largest-ever barrage of 18 one-way attack drones, anti-ship cruise missiles and an anti-ship ballistic missile at a host of international commercial vessels and warships in the Red Sea.

While the U.S. and partner military ships and aircraft now protecting the waterways were able to deflect Tuesday’s attack, the scope and severity of the launch drew international condemnation and left few options other than to carry through with international warnings that any further attacks would draw a substantial response.

In response, the U.S. and U.K. struck Houthi missile, radar and drone capabilities to degrade the group’s ability to conduct more attacks like Tuesday’s barrage.

In response to the strikes, which occurred in Yemen just before Friday 3 a.m. local time, the rebel group has already pledged to retaliate. Later in the day, the Houthis said the strikes killed five people and wounded six, without elaborating on who the casualties were.

Here’s a look at the Houthis and their increasing attacks, and why the U.S. believes it is more acceptable to bomb some Iranian-linked targets than others.

Who are the Houthis?

Houthi rebels swept down from their northern stronghold in Yemen and seized the capital, Sanaa, in 2014, launching a grinding war. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in 2015 to try to restore Yemen’s exiled, internationally recognized government to power.

Years of bloody, inconclusive fighting against the Saudi-led coalition settled into a stalemated proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, causing widespread hunger and misery in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country. The war has killed more than 150,000 people, including fighters and civilians, and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, killing tens of thousands more.

A cease-fire that technically ended more than a year ago is still largely being honored. Saudi Arabia and the rebels have done some prisoner swaps, and a Houthi delegation was invited to high-level peace talks in Riyadh in September as part of a wider détente the kingdom has reached with Iran. While they reported “positive results,” there is still no permanent peace.

Attacks on ships

The Houthis have sporadically targeted ships in the region over time, but the attacks have increased since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas and spiked after an explosion October 17 at a hospital in Gaza killed and injured many. That hospital blast marked the beginning of an intense militant campaign against U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, and on many commercial vessels transiting the Red Sea. The attacks have damaged commercial ships and forced international shipping companies to divert their vessels around the Cape of Good Hope.

As of Thursday the Houthis had launched 27 different attacks on vessels transiting the Southern Red Sea, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a Pentagon press conference.

Houthi military spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Saree has said the group wants to “prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea (and Gulf of Aden) until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops.”

But few of the ships targeted have had direct links to Israel. In a recent attack, one of the commercial ships hit — the Unity Explorer — had a tenuous Israeli link. It is owned by a British firm that includes Dan David Ungar, who lives in Israel, as one of its officers. Israeli media identified Ungar as being the son of Israeli shipping billionaire Abraham “Rami” Ungar. But any Israel connections to other ships are unclear.

U.S. officials have argued that the Houthis haven’t technically targeted U.S. military vessels or forces — a subtlety that Navy ship captains watching the incoming drones may question.

In response to the attacks, last month Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Operation Prosperity Guardian, where the U.S. and more than 20 other countries have created a protective umbrella for the commercial vessels that are not re-routing and decide to transit the Red Sea.

If that operation had not provided escort the commercial vessels and intercepted the incoming fire, “we have no doubt that ships would have been struck, perhaps even sunk, including in one case a commercial ship full of jet fuel,” a senior administration official told reporters late Thursday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the strikes. “We’ve had extremely close calls.”

To date Operation Prosperity Guardian has helped more than 1,500 commercial vessels safely transit the Red Sea.

The US calculus

While the U.S. has carried out airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria that have targeted American troops in 130 different attacks since October 17, until Thursday the military had not yet retaliated against the Houthis.

That reluctance reflects political sensitivities and stems largely from broader Biden administration concerns about upending the shaky truce in Yemen and triggering a wider conflict in the region. The White House wants to preserve the truce and is wary of taking action that could open up another war front.

Iran-backed militias have launched one-way attack drones, rockets or close-range ballistic missiles at bases in Iraq 53 times and in Syria 77 times. Dozens of troops have suffered injuries as a result of the attacks, in many cases traumatic brain injuries.

In response, the U.S. has retaliated with airstrikes multiple times in Syria since October 17, targeting weapons depots and other facilities linked directly to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and the militias. And it struck multiple sites in Iraq late last month after a militia group for the first time fired short-range ballistic missiles at U.S. forces at Al-Asad air base.

But until Thursday, striking the Houthis had been a different calculus.

In one breath, Pentagon officials had said Navy ships shot down Houthi drones heading toward them because they were deemed “a threat.” But in the next breath officials said the U.S. had assessed that the ships were not the target. That determination often comes later after intelligence assessments review telemetry and other data.

That, however, is certainly no comfort to sailors on the ships who watch the radar track of incoming drones and must make rapid decisions about whether they represent threats to the ship.

At the same time, the U.S. has consistently said it wants to protect free navigation of the seas. But the Houthi actions have prompted the International Maritime Security Construct to issue a warning for ships transiting the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb. It says ships should choose routes as far from Yemeni waters as possible, travel at night and not stop, because that makes them an easier target.

The Biden administration has talked persistently about the need to avoid escalating the Israel-Hamas war into a broader regional conflict. So far, strikes on the Iranian-backed groups in Iraq and Syria have not broadened the conflict, said Ryder.

It’s not clear if targeted strikes against Houthi weapons depots or similar sites — which also have Iranian support — would cross a line and trigger a wider war.

“We will continue to consult with international allies and partners on an appropriate way to protect commercial shipping going through that region, and at the same time ensuring we do what we need to do to protect our forces,” said Ryder.

the pentagon — The United States, Britain and a handful of other allies answered dozens of Houthi attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden with a series of powerful airstrikes designed to severely degrade the Iranian-backed group’s capabilities.

U.S. Central Command late Thursday said the series of strikes hit more than 60 targets at 16 locations in Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen, including command and control nodes, munitions depots, launching systems, and production facilities.

“We hit them pretty hard, pretty good,” a U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the operation, told VOA, adding the strikes also targeted Houthi radar installations and air defense systems which did not fire back.

A spokesperson for the Houthi rebel group said the strikes killed at least five fighters and wounded six others, without specifying the targets that were hit.

The U.S. and British strikes, carried out with the help of Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and Bahrain, were launched from fighter jets, surface vessels and submarines, the defense official said.

The U.S. alone, dropped more than 100 precision guided munitions on the Houthi installations, officials said, with the naval vessels and submarines firing Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles to take out the intended targets.

The official also said the targets were chosen both because of their threat to shipping and the lack of a civilian presence.

In a statement from the White House late Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden called the strikes a “direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks” on international shipping, saying they were necessary after attempts at diplomacy were ignored.

“These targeted strikes are a clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes,” Biden said. “I will not hesitate to direct further measures to protect our people and the free flow of international commerce as necessary.”

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak likewise condemned the Houthi attacks as destabilizing, confirming the participation of British fighter jets in Thursday’s strikes.

“Their reckless actions are risking lives at sea and exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Yemen,” Sunak said in a statement. “This cannot stand.”

It is the first time Houthi targets inside Yemen have been struck since the militants began attacking ships in the Red Sea following Hamas’ assault on Israel on October 7.

U.S. officials late Thursday were still studying the impact of the strikes against the Houthis, but an initial assessment suggested the damage to Houthi capabilities is “significant.”

“We were going after very specific capability in very specific locations with precision munitions,” said a senior U.S. military official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the operation.

“This was a significant action,” added a senior U.S. administration official. “[We have] every expectation that it will degrade in a significant way, the Houthis, a capability to launch exactly the sorts of attacks that they have conducted over the period of recent weeks.”

There have been 27 attacks launched from Houthi-held areas of Yemen since mid-November, impacting citizens, cargo and vessels from more than 50 countries, according to the U.S.

U.S. officials said in one instance last month, U.S. defensive action prevented a Houthi attack from hitting and likely sinking a commercial ship full of jet fuel.

The most recent Houthi attack, involving the launch of an anti-ship ballistic missile, took place earlier Thursday. The missile landed in the Gulf of Aden near a commercial vessel, causing no injuries or damage.

On Tuesday, U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, said the Houthis launched a complex attack using 18 one-way attack drones, two cruise missiles and one ballistic missile from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen toward Red Sea shipping lanes where dozens of merchant vessels were transiting.

U.S. combat jets, along with U.S. and British military vessels, responded by shooting down the drones and missiles, averting any damage to ships or injuries to their crews in the area.

The senior U.S. administration official said it was Tuesday’s massive attack by the Houthis that prompted Biden to order Thursday strikes.

Before the U.S. and British-led strikes late Thursday, multiple U.S. officials warned both the Houthis and Iran against what they described as reckless and illegal behavior.

“There will be consequences,” Pentagon press secretary Major General Pat Ryder said Thursday in response to a question from VOA.

“The Houthis are funded, trained, equipped by Iran to a large degree. And, so, we know that Iran has a role to play in terms of helping to cease this reckless, dangerous and illegal activity,” he said.

Last week, the United States and 12 allies issued a statement warning the Houthis of unspecified consequences if their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea continued.

“Let our message now be clear: We call for the immediate end of these illegal attacks and release of unlawfully detained vessels and crews,” the statement said.

Signatories on the statement included Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany and Japan.

The statement followed the launch in mid-December of Operation Prosperity Guardian by the United States, Britain and nearly 20 other countries to protect ships from Houthi attacks.

Since the launch of Prosperity Guardian, at least 1,500 vessels have passed safely through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden.

The commander of U.S. Navy operations in the Middle East last week called it “the largest surface and air presence in the southern Red Sea in years.”

The U.N. Security Council issued its own resolution Wednesday, calling on the Houthis to stop the attacks immediately.

There are questions, however, as to whether the statements, backed now by the U.S. and British strikes against the Houthis, will do anything to deter Tehran.

“Iran has the luxury of really fighting a, what I would call, a hidden-hand operation with very few Iranians on the ground,” the former commander of U.S. Central Command, retired General Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, told a webinar on Wednesday.

“They’re choking world shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb [Strait] at a very low, very low price for Iran,” he said.

But McKenzie argued that even if Iran continues to encourage the Houthis, the risk of a wider regional escalation is slim.

“I do not believe the escalation ladder leads out of Yemen. I believe it stays in Yemen,” he said. “And I believe Iran will leave their partners down there, their proxies down there, to their fate.”

U.S. officials said while they were bracing for the Houthis to try to mount some sort of response to the strikes, a slew of initial claims of attacks late Thursday appeared to be nothing more than disinformation.

This is not the first time the U.S. military has targeted Houthi launch sites in Yemen in response to militant attacks against vessels in nearby waters. In October 2016, the American destroyer USS Nitze launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at three radar sites along Yemen’s Red Sea coast in order to degrade the Houthi’s ability to track and target ships.

Ostap Yarysh with VOA’s Ukrainian Service contributed to this report.

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

Give us 5 minutes, and we’ll give you the world. Around the clock, Voice of America keeps you in touch with the latest news. We bring you reports from our correspondents and interviews with newsmakers from across the world.

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On January 13, voters in Taiwan will cast their ballots to elect the island’s next president. While each candidate has been working hard to win more votes, some remain undecided in the race, in which China has been a key issue. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee travelled to different parts of Taiwan to hear what the voters have to say. (Camera: Elizabeth Lee, Bill Gallo, Stephen Boitano; Produced by Elizabeth Lee; Contributor: William Yang)