Germany Opens Fight to Kill Nicaragua's 'Genocide Facilitation' Case at The Hague

Germany spent Monday at the International Court of Justice trying to get a genocide-related lawsuit thrown out before it ever reaches the merits.

Nicaragua filed the case in 2024, accusing Berlin of "facilitating genocide" in Gaza by continuing to supply Israel with weapons. Germany is Israel's second-largest arms supplier after the United States, according to The Independent. Lawyers for Germany opened four days of hearings at the ICJ in The Hague, arguing the court either lacks jurisdiction or that Nicaragua's claims don't hold up, according to Euronews and Arab News.

Tania von Uslar-Gleichen, who leads Germany's legal team, told judges Nicaragua's case "has no basis in fact or law," per The Independent. Berlin's written filing calls the claims "grossly biased," and Germany has told the court its arms exports face "detailed scrutiny that far exceeds the requirements of international law," according to Arab News and Asharq Al-Awsat.

Nicaragua's ambassador to the Netherlands, Carlos Jose Arguello Gomez, argued the opposite in the 2024 hearings that preceded Monday's session: "Germany seems not to be able to differentiate between self-defense and genocide." Nicaragua called Berlin "pathetic" for funding humanitarian aid to Gaza while simultaneously arming Israel, per Arab News and Euronews.

The ICJ rejected Nicaragua's 2024 request for emergency measures that would have ordered Germany to halt military aid outright, ruling that "the circumstances, as they now present themselves" didn't justify it. But the same panel declined to dismiss the underlying case, which is why Germany is back this week trying to kill it on jurisdictional grounds instead, according to Euronews.

No court in this case or the separate one has ruled that genocide occurred. This proceeding is about Germany's conduct as an arms supplier, not a direct genocide finding against Israel, which isn't even a party to it.

The genocide question itself is being litigated in a different, higher-profile case: South Africa's 2023 suit directly against Israel at the same court. In January 2024, ICJ judges ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent genocidal acts and improve Gaza's humanitarian situation, per The Independent. South Africa says Israel largely ignored those orders. Israel disputes that its campaign amounts to genocide and has never been found guilty of it by any court.

Berlin's own record on this has moved. Germany paused authorizing exports of military equipment usable in Gaza last year, then lifted those restrictions, according to The Independent. Neither the pause nor the reversal has been explained in detail in Germany's public filings so far.

The strongest case for those pressing genocide claims rests on scale: tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths in Gaza, mass displacement, and an ICJ panel that found in January 2024 grounds serious enough to order Israel to prevent genocidal acts. Even after a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, Israeli fire has killed more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza, with five Israeli soldiers also killed since the truce, per The Independent's reporting on the ICJ's caseload.

The strongest pushback comes from critics who argue specific atrocity claims collapsed under scrutiny. Columnist David Harsanyi, writing for the Epoch Times, points to a May 2025 claim by Tom Fletcher, the U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, on BBC Radio that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours absent aid, a figure UNICEF's own infant population data for Gaza (about 20,000 total) made mathematically implausible. Harsanyi notes the underlying U.N. estimate was actually 14,000 potential malnutrition cases among Gaza's roughly 1 million children over the following year, not imminent infant deaths. He also cites a UNICEF-led Nutrition SMART Survey that found acute malnutrition in Gaza at 0.5 percent, among the lowest in the region, after the U.S.-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation delivered what Harsanyi says totaled roughly 187 million meal equivalents.

Both sets of facts exist. What's unresolved is whether they add up to genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention, a legal threshold requiring proof of specific intent to destroy a group, not just high civilian casualties or humanitarian crisis, however severe. These cases take years because the ICJ has no independent fact-finding army in Gaza, relies on submissions from interested parties, and its rulings, even when they come, aren't enforceable. The court has ordered Russia to stop its invasion of Ukraine; Moscow has ignored it, per Arab News and Euronews.

Nicaragua responds to Germany's objections on Tuesday, with both sides getting additional time Wednesday and Thursday. The court typically takes about six months to rule on jurisdictional objections like these. If Germany loses this round, the case moves to a full merits hearing on whether arming Israel constitutes facilitating genocide, a question no court has yet answered.