The UN’s top court said on Wednesday that Israel must allow UN bodies, including the agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, to provide humanitarian assistance in Gaza and ensure locals have access to the “essential supplies of daily life”.
The advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) was requested last year by the UN General Assembly after Israel passed laws that in effect banned Unrwa – which was for years the leading provider of aid in Gaza – from operating in the devastated Palestinian enclave.
“As an occupying power, Israel is obliged to ensure the basic needs of the local population, including the supplies essential for their survival,” the court said, adding that the UN, through Unrwa, had been an “indispensable provider of humanitarian relief in the Gaza Strip”.
In a wide-ranging – but non-binding – opinion, the court added that Israel must not use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war and must not forcibly transfer or deport people in Gaza, the occupied West Bank or East Jerusalem.
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It also said Israel must allow Red Cross staff access to Palestinian prisoners – something it has not done since Hamas’s October 7th, 2023 attack on southern Israel, which ignited the two-year war in Gaza.
Israel’s foreign ministry “categorically” rejected the ICJ’s opinion and said Israel “fully upholds its obligations under international law”.
“This is yet another political attempt to impose political measures against Israel under the guise of ‘international law’,” the ministry added.
The opinion came as US vice-president JD Vance met Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem as part of a push by the US administration to prevent the fragile two-week-old ceasefire brokered by Donald Trump between Israel and Hamas from unravelling.
It also coincided with a preliminary vote in the Israeli parliament in which legislators backed applying Israeli law to the West Bank – a step that would amount to annexing the territory that Palestinians seek as the heart of a future state but which Israel has occupied for more than half a century.
Israeli politicians have long been hostile to Unrwa, but tensions over the agency intensified sharply after Hamas’s October 2023 attack.
Israeli officials accused 19 of its 13,000 staff in Gaza of participating in the assault – during which militants killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and took 250 hostage – and alleged that Unrwa had been broadly infiltrated by Hamas, before barring it from Gaza.
Last March, Israel imposed a total blockade on aid deliveries to the enclave for 11 weeks, before establishing a new system run by a previously unknown private group that was marred by the repeated killing of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers as they sought to reach the new aid sites.
In its opinion, the ICJ said Israel had not substantiated its allegations that a significant number of Unrwa staff were members of the Palestinian militant group.
The fact that nine staff were sacked over “possible involvement” in October 7th was “insufficient to support a conclusion that UNRWA, as a whole ... is not a neutral organisation”, it said.
The ICJ advisory opinion is the latest in a series of international legal cases sparked by Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which has killed more than 68,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, and caused a humanitarian catastrophe in the enclave.
Last year, South Africa brought a case at the ICJ accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, which has since been backed by nearly 100 other countries, while the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Mr Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes”.
Israel has vehemently rejected allegations of genocide and called South Africa’s case “profoundly distorted”. Mr Netanyahu’s office has dismissed the arrest warrants as anti-Semitic.
Gazan authorities buried the bodies of 54 unidentified people handed over by Israel, the Gaza government media office said. Medics said 30 more bodies arrived at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis after being released by Israel.
Israeli authorities have said the bodies belong to militants who invaded Israel in the October 7th attacks or were killed in battle with Israeli forces in Gaza during the war.
Hamas has released the bodies of 15 out of 28 deceased hostages seized in 2023. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025. Additional reporting: Reuters.
