Not just the US: India to Brazil, 51 nations armed Israel amid Gaza war

On a cold day in early January 2024, protesters gathered outside the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to denounce Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, then nearly 100 days old.

More than 3,000km (1,864 miles) away, some Palestinians in Gaza followed the proceedings, livestreamed on YouTube, but most were trying to survive Israel’s relentless bombardment.

In nearly eight decades of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, only a handful of cases had ever reached the court. That day, South Africa was asking the world’s highest court to consider whether Israel’s assault on Gaza constituted a genocide - the destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group.

Inside the courtroom, Irish lawyer Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, who was representing South Africa, began to speak.

“The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people,” she told the judges, despite Israeli officials’ “dehumanising, genocidal rhetoric” matched by the military actions in Gaza.

“This is the first genocide in history, where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time, in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something,” she said.

An average of 247 Palestinians were being killed every day, Ni Ghralaigh told the court; 48 mothers, two every hour; more than 117 children daily, five each hour.

She referred to the new acronym used among doctors and aid workers that had emerged from the devastation: WCNSF - wounded child, no surviving family. By that point, more than 7,000 Palestinians had been killed.

“These facts,” Ni Ghralaigh said, “could not present a clearer or more compelling case” for genocide.

On January 26, 2024, the ICJ ruled that there was a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and ordered provisional measures. Crucially, it reminded all states party to the Genocide Convention, of which there are 153, of their obligations: to act to prevent genocide.

But over the next 22 months, the killing continued. By the time a ceasefire was reached in October 2025, more than 70,000 people had been killed, with some 171,000 injured.

Throughout that period, the weapons to Israel kept flowing.

Weapons exports

A months-long Al Jazeera investigation has found that military-related goods originating from at least 51 countries and self-governing territories continued entering Israel after the ICJ’s warning of a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza.