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In a post from its official X account yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs directed a message towards The Hague Group, a growing coalition of sovereign states – including South Africa, Colombia, and Malaysia – that were meeting in an emergency session in The Hague to discuss the enforcement of international law and accountability for actions in Gaza. The Israeli ministry posted an image of 40 assembled nations alongside a photograph of thick black smoke rising from a targeted Iranian vessel, sunk earlier that same day. Part of the caption read: “We can expect the outcome of the Hague meeting to be as successful as Iran’s navy.”
The post was published on an official government account and has not been retracted. It references an active military operation. When announcing the strikes, President Trump told the Iranian people that the government would be “yours to take” once the bombing was finished.
In that context, the juxtaposition of a sinking warship with an image of diplomats and experts is far more than an abstract provocation. A comparison is being made between military targets and the participants in a meeting to uphold international law.
The Hague Group represents a significant shift in Global South diplomacy. Established on January 31, 2025, it was founded by eight core nations: Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa, with the explicit mandate of coordinating state action to enforce the International Court of Justice (ICJ) provisional measures.
The coalition explicitly frames what it is doing as compliance with an existing international legal framework, not a departure from it. Israel, by contrast, has responded by comparing a diplomatic meeting to a military target. That choice of response is itself revealing. It reflects contempt for the process, for the participants, and for the premise that legal accountability applies equally to all states.
Far from being an isolated “fringe” group, as depicted by Israel in its post, by March 2026, The Hague Group’s influence had expanded significantly, with 40 nations – including G20 members like Brazil and Saudi Arabia, alongside European states like Spain and Norway – convening to discuss concrete measures to ensure the enforcement of international law.
In the final statement from the March 4 emergency meeting, the 40 nations in attendance proposed a sweeping package of concrete measures to move “from rhetoric to action”. This included a total prohibition on the import of settlement goods and a halt to the transfer or transit of all arms, military fuel, and dual-use items to Israel. A significant new measure involved the implementation of disclosure requirements for travellers using Israeli documents. Individuals who have served in the Israeli military could now be subject to “secondary screening at ports of entry” under national war crimes inadmissibility rules. The group emphasised that these steps are required to fulfil “third-state obligations” as determined by the July 2024 ICJ advisory opinion. They argued that states must actively prevent any assistance that maintains the illegal occupation.
The Israeli ministry’s tweet dismissed the coalition as “corrupt regimes” united by “hatred”. But the legal standing of this group is bound up with a history that Israel cannot so easily dismiss.
During the height of the apartheid era in South Africa, when the world was beginning to isolate the white-minority government in Pretoria, Israel remained one of its most steadfast allies. This was a deep strategic partnership involving nuclear collaboration and advanced military technology. The very tools of state violence that maintained apartheid were often developed or refined in tandem with Israeli expertise. Evidence of this alliance includes the widely documented 1979 “Vela incident”, believed to be a joint nuclear weapons test conducted by Israel and South Africa in the South Atlantic, a move that bypassed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
This history does not resolve the legal questions before the ICJ. But it does complicate Israel’s framing of the current coalition. The nations now pressing for enforcement of international law are, in several cases, the same nations that spent decades on the receiving end of Israeli-backed impunity.
The current moment adds another layer of historical irony. The February 28 strikes on Iran have given new prominence to Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, heir to the Pahlavi dynasty, who has thanked Donald Trump for “striking the monstrous regime” in what he has referred to as a “humanitarian intervention”. In April 2023, on an official visit to Israel organised by the Israeli intelligence minister, Pahlavi spoke of rekindling “the ancient bond” between the people of Israel and Iran and promoted the “Cyrus Accords” to re-establish ties between them.
Under his father’s reign, Iran was one of apartheid South Africa’s most important economic partners. By 1978, Iran supplied more than 90 percent of South Africa’s crude oil imports, neutralising the Arab oil embargo that had been one of the international community’s primary tools of pressure against Pretoria. The shah’s father died in exile in Johannesburg in 1944.
It is precisely this history – of legal frameworks selectively enforced and of international isolation applied to some states but not others – that The Hague Group is designed to address. The Hague Group’s March 4 statement names what that history points towards: A choice facing states between complicity and compliance.
The group warned that if states do not act now to “give international law teeth”, the legal framework governing global order “will not be worth the paper it’s written on”. Indeed, if the outcome of a meeting defined by compliance with international law is to be measured by Israel and its allies in terms of the “success” of a bombed ship, then the very concept of international law has already been set ablaze.
There is no more urgent moment than now to hold to account those setting fire to the rules-based order.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
