Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has called Israel’s attack “genocide,” adding: “I am saddened and disappointed to note the silence of international community against this injustice. The silence and ineffectiveness of Muslim Ummah [community] has made Palestinians more vulnerable and made Israel more aggressive. World must stop Israel from this naked and brutal aggression.”

Others who have charged that Israel is committing genocide include Bolivian President Evo Morales, who recalled that country’s ambassador from Israel, as have Brazil, is genocide.”

Similarly, from the the Venezuelan government: Israel has “initiated a higher phase of its policy of genocide and extermination with the ground invasion of Palestinian territory, killing innocent men, women, girls and boys.”

Leading legal scholars have also called what Israel is doing genocide. It’s important to note that you don’t need millions of dead bodies and a Nazi industrial system of extermination to constitute genocide under the relevant convention. See from President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights Michael Ratner: “UN’s Investigation of Israel Should Go Beyond War Crimes to Genocide” and the piece “More voices describe Gaza slaughter as a ‘genocide.’“

But none of these governments seem to be moving to actually invoking the relevant legal remedy for the charge they make: The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. 

Professor Francis Boyle at the University of Illinois is proposing that they do so — and has laid out a legal strategy to do so that attempts to shortcut the , Gambia, Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Russia, Tunisia, Uganda and other countries are perfectly positioned legally to do so. (The list of signatory states is here. If there’s no footnote for a country regarding Article IX, that country can move invoke the convention against Israel.)

Notes Quigley: “A country with a reservation to Article IX could drop it and then sue. A country lacking a reservation cannot add one. A reservation can be entered only upon becoming a party.”

So, what’s stopping these countries from invoking the treaty against Israel? In part, it appears to be the Palestinian Authority. Or more exactly, the Palestine Office at the United Nations. Which is ironic, since PA head Abbas has called it genocide: “It’s genocide — the killing of entire families is genocide by Israel against our Palestinian people.”

It’s imperative that countries that may be considering action along these lines not be hindered by the PA — over the course of decades, it’s been clear that the PA does not have a legal Palestine: Go to International Criminal Court.” So far, those at the Palestine mission in New Iraq.)

The Palestine mission to the UN could fear that if they went to the ICC, that court would go after Palestinians for relatively minor crimes just as the ICC has done for Africans. Or it could be because the Palestinian Authority does not want to upset Israel, either because they are defacto operating in collusion or because they fear that such a legal move against Israel would mean Israel will use even more violence, including in the West Bank and conceivably targeting PA officials and their families.

AP recently reported: