ICJ case leader Zane Dangor on famine, genocide and diplomacy

When SA launched its International Court of Justice case of genocide against Israel, many were sceptical. Now, as credible sources confirm a famine in Gaza, the world is taking the bid seriously.

- By Kevin Bloom

‘Today, Israel's hindrances to the import of food and essential items have brought Gaza to the brink of famine," Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish barrister acting as an adviser to the South African legal team in its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), testified back in January of 2024, "with adults — mothers, fathers, grandparents — regularly foregoing food for the day so that children can eat... Israel continues to deny that it is responsible for the humanitarian crisis it has created, even as Gaza starves.

More than 19 months later, on 22 August 2025, the world's most credible food monitoring institution officially declared a famine in the enclave, with more than half a million people affected. The next day, on cue, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the Gazan famine declaration as a “modern blood libel”.

With Netanyahu's plans to reoccupy the enclave and depopulate Gaza City going ahead, billions of human beings were now asking the same deceitfully simple question — if the ICJ could not enforce the obligations of its signatory states, when and how would the atrocities stop?

Shortly before the famine declaration, we put this and other related questions to Zane Dangor, director-general of South Africa's Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco). As the chief architect of our country's case at the ICJ, a man with extensive on-the-ground knowledge of the forces at play in the Middle East, the insights that Dangor had to offer were shocking, revelatory and hopeful.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.