The International Court of Justice has not yet delivered its verdict on whether genocide is being committed in Gaza — and The Guardian reports the delay comes down to a court that is being, in the words of its reporting, "really cautious" before ruling on the gravest charge in international law.

That phrase does the heavy lifting here. It signals that the ICJ, the United Nations' principal judicial organ sitting in The Hague, is deliberately slowing its own machinery rather than stalling for institutional reasons. For practitioners, the distinction matters: caution at this court is a design feature, not a malfunction.

What is the ICJ actually deciding?

The court is weighing allegations that genocide — defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention as acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group — has occurred in Gaza during the war. Genocide is the most serious accusation in international law. No court treats it lightly.

The Genocide Convention empowers the ICJ to hear disputes between states party to the treaty. South Africa brought the case against Israel. The proceeding has already produced interim rulings on emergency measures. The full merits verdict — the decision on the genocide allegation itself — is what remains outstanding.

Why is the court being 'really cautious'?

The Guardian's reporting points to a simple institutional truth. A genocide finding against a state is a once-in-a-generation judgment. It carries legal, political and historical weight that few rulings approach. Think of it as the difference between a court fining a company and a court ordering that company's dissolution — the evidentiary and institutional bar climbs sharply.

Caution shows up in the machinery. Judges must work through a large evidentiary record. They must assess intent, the hardest element of the genocide standard, because destroying a group "in part" requires proof of a specific mental state behind the physical acts. The bench also issues individual opinions, which take time to draft, translate and reconcile across the court's working languages.

There is also the composition problem. The ICJ benches judges drawn from different legal traditions. Consensus on a genocide finding needs more than a majority headcount; it needs a judgment that holds up under scrutiny from dissenting judges, states and historians.

What does the delay change for practitioners?

Not much, procedurally — and that is the point. The court has already shown it can move fast when asked for emergency measures. Those interim orders exist precisely so that the merits phase can proceed without the same time pressure. A slow merits ruling does not freeze the litigation; it reflects that the provisional stage and the final stage run on different clocks.

For lawyers advising states and international organisations, the practical read is this: expect a lengthy, heavily reasoned judgment rather than a quick determination. Expect separate and dissenting opinions. And expect the operative language — the binding part of the ruling — to be parsed line by line the moment it lands, because enforcement runs through the UN Security Council, where politics can block what law commands.

What happens next?

The court will deliver its judgment in due course, in public session at the Peace Palace. Until then, the strongest signal available is the one The Guardian identified: a court acutely aware that what it writes will outlast the war itself.