Israel will respond today to accusations brought by South Africa at the UN’s top court that its military operation in Gaza is a state-led genocide campaign aimed at wiping out the Palestinian population, Reuters reports.

South Africa, which filed the lawsuit at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in December, asked judges on Thursday to impose emergency measures ordering Israel to immediately halt the offensive.

Israel rejected the accusations of genocide as baseless and said South Africa was acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas, which it views as a terrorist organisation seeking to eliminate the Jewish state. Its military was targeting Hamas fighters, not Palestinian civilians, it said.

The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

The court is expected to rule on possible emergency measures later this month, but will not rule at that time on the genocide allegations — those proceedings could take years. The ICJ’s decisions are final and without appeal — but the court has no way to enforce them.