The Legal Department of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine praised the courage of human rights and humanitarian organizations that believe in the values of freedom, justice, and human rights, and their insistence on fulfilling their mission to stop the participation of European and Western states in Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people, the encouragement of Israeli settlement activities, and the annexation plan in the West Bank. This comes following the announcement by the Court of Appeals in The Hague that it would retain the lawsuit filed by Palestinian and Dutch human rights organizations regarding arms exports to Israel.
According to Articles I and III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the signatory states pledge and commit to preventing genocide. Anyone who commits, participates in, conspires, or directly and publicly incites genocide shall be punished. The Netherlands is one of the signatories to the Convention. The International Court of Justice, in its binding ruling of January 26, 2024, affirmed Israel’s responsibility, along with other states, to take measures to prevent genocide.
The Legal Department of the Front stresses that the ICJ’s call—despite negligence and severe delays in follow-up—remains, until now, mere ink on paper. Israel has taken no measures to prevent the continuation of the crime; rather, the genocide has persisted in killings and destruction, openly. The weapon of starvation has continued and worsened, with public admissions from occupation officials. Furthermore, third states have not respected the Court’s ruling prohibiting participation in and incitement of genocide, and instead continued to supply Israel with weapons on an unprecedented scale after the Court’s ruling.
The Legal Department pointed out that the Netherlands, along with other states, is obligated to halt arms exports to Israel. This is the basis upon which Dutch human rights organizations filed their lawsuit before the Court of Appeals in The Hague, as the Netherlands violated its international obligations under the Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions. The Israeli army—accused of committing genocide in the Gaza Strip—used Dutch weapons in the war.
This lawsuit is not the first of its kind. Previously, in November 2024, the Dutch Supreme Court called for halting the export of F-16 aircraft parts to Israel, based on a ruling issued by a Dutch Court of Appeals in February 2024, which had called on the government to suspend those exports due to fears of their use in violations of international law in Gaza.
The Legal Department of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, while condemning the continued involvement of certain states in the genocidal war against the Palestinian people—through their continued supply of arms used to kill children and women in Gaza—calls on human rights and humanitarian organizations to persist in prosecuting, exposing, and unmasking those states that persist in political hypocrisy and deception: publicly speaking against genocide, starvation, and annexation plans, while secretly maintaining military, security, and intelligence partnerships with the Israeli occupation, encouraging it to continue its war against the Palestinian people, their land, and their national rights in Gaza and the West Bank.