South Africa tells the ICJ that Israel has ignored its orders

South Africa has filed a dossier at the International Court of Justice arguing that Israel has failed to carry out the binding provisional measures the court ordered in the genocide case brought over Gaza, its Department of International Relations and Cooperation said.

The submission was made on 25 August. It is intended to assist a committee of the court that monitors whether Israel is implementing the orders and that is weighing what options are open to the judges, the department said.

Palestinians are still being deprived of water, health care, medicine and other essentials, according to the statement, which said Pretoria would keep pursuing "all avenues available" to obtain full and immediate compliance.

The dossier also accuses Israel of killing Palestinian journalists and of barring foreign correspondents and UN-mandated investigators from entering Gaza, leaving the court reliant on evidence gathered under conditions Israel controls.

On the period since the ceasefire was announced, the department said one Palestinian child has been killed by the Israeli military on average every day, and that miscarriage rates in Gaza have risen more than threefold during 2026. Survivors, it said, are being pushed into an ever-shrinking area and held in conditions it described as unbearable.

The measures at issue were ordered in 2024 and require Israel to take all steps within its power to prevent acts falling under Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention. They are binding, but the court has no means of enforcing them, and the question of what follows repeated non-compliance has been left open since they were issued.

That is what the filing is aimed at. Rather than opening an argument about the merits of the case, which will take years, it puts a record of the months since the orders in front of the body charged with tracking them, and asks the court to decide what it does when its own instructions are disregarded.