By Guillermo Alvarado

The process initiated by South Africa before the International Criminal Court, ICC, against the State of Israel, which it accuses for the crime of ongoing genocide against the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip, began in The Hague, Netherlands.

The South African Minister of Justice, Ronald Lamola, pointed out that no armed attack on the territory of a country, however serious it may be, such as that perpetrated by the Hamas organization on October 7 on Israeli soil, justifies violating the Convention for the Prevention of Genocide.

On that occasion, the Islamist group raided several villages and killed nearly 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and took a large number of hostages.

The gravity of these events, however, is no reason to ignore Tel Aviv's disproportionate response, which is openly carrying out an ethnic cleansing in Gaza that has already killed more than 23,000 people, most of them women, children and the elderly.

It is a lie that Zionist actions are aimed exclusively at destroying Hamas targets, as can be seen in practice.

It is a cruel paradox that the Convention for the Prevention of Genocide was signed after World War II in the face of the horror of the barbarity of the German Nazi regime against the Jewish people, and that the Zionists are now repeating it by targeting the Palestinians.

The international legal action initiated by South Africa has already received the support of several nations, including Colombia, Brazil and Bolivia, and recently some 100 Chilean lawyers filed a formal complaint before the ICC against Benjamin Netanyahu for the crime of genocide.

As usual, Tel Aviv launched a campaign to make itself the victim and not the executor of these atrocities, including attacks and insults to South Africa for this courageous decision that should be more strongly supported by the international community, too slow to react.

The most common argument of the Zionist regime and its unconditional protector, the United States, is the alleged "right to defense", a position that does not stand up to the slightest legal analysis in the face of the atrocities seen in Gaza, where schools, homes and hospitals were intentionally bombed.

There are more than a million human beings in imminent danger of death from disease and starvation and the few who are lucky enough to survive have already been sentenced to expulsion from their land and what was their home, to be handed over to settlers of the occupying power. Let us hope that justice does not waver.