South Africa has kept up its steady exporting of coal to Israel despite its strong rhetoric against the war in Gaza in the United Nations and elsewhere, as well as the genocide case it filed against Tel Aviv at the International Court of Justice, or ICJ.

As of January 2025, coal remained one of South Africa’s top exports to Israel. South Africa’s coal shipments to Israel grew 17 percent, compared with January 2024. The total export value of coal and other products also grew 22.9 percent, compared with the previous year, representing about $28 million.

Over the past five years, trade between the two countries has only increased, with South Africa reaping an average rise of 20.6 percent, according to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), an open-source platform.

Israel has leaned heavily on its closest ally, the United States, for ammunition and other weaponry to carry out its war in Gaza to eliminate the Hamas militia. But Israel’s complex artificial intelligence systems used in analyzing and tracking the activities of all Gazans in the enclave and the other Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories require a steady power source — some of it provided by South African coal.

Israeli officials and multiple media reports say that the Israel Defense Forces rely on webs of sophisticated AI tools and machine-learning systems to identify Hamas militants in Gaza. These systems sort through troves of communications — text messages, emails, chats and phone conversations – of Palestinians in the enclave to find patterns that suggest nefarious activities. The data are even used to rate every Gazan by a number relating to the likelihood of the person being a Hamas member.

This high-tech operation requires a steady electrical flow for Israel generated partly from tons of coal imported from South Africa — a UN member state and Africa’s biggest economic powerhouse — which has also taken Israel to the UN’s highest international court for committing alleged war crimes in Gaza. Tel Aviv has dismissed the charges, saying it has the right to defend itself.

Although the court has not initially ruled on the plausibility that Israel’s military actions in Gaza amount to genocide, it ordered Israel to take every measure to stop acts that breach the 1948 Genocide Convention. The UN, other international bodies and many countries say these steps have not been carried out. (The International Criminal Court, separate from the ICJ, has issued arrest warrants against President Benjamin Netanyahu; Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former defense minister; and a Hamas defendant, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, who has since been declared dead.)

The Israeli mission to the UN did not respond to PassBlue’s questions regarding its continued trade dealings with South Africa.

South Africa is the third-largest exporter of coal to Israel, after Colombia and Russia. Its coal sales provide a portion of the electricity Israel generates to continue its targeted tracking of Gazans, which has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians as collateral damage. More than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war started on Oct. 7, 2023, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not publicly break down civilian casualties from militants.

PassBlue found that the KSL Salvador, a Chinese-made bulk carrier, was en route from Richards Bay Port in Durban, South Africa, to the Orot Rabin power plant in Hadera, Israel, with coal just as Pretoria filed its case at the ICJ in December 2023, alleging war crimes against Israel in its assault in Gaza. Data from Marine Traffic, a ship-tracking service, showed that the KSL Salvador left the South African coal port on Dec. 4, 2023, and berthed in Hadera, in the Haifa port in northern Israel, on Jan. 19, 2024.

On Jan. 31, 2025, The Hague Group, a coalition of eight global South nations that include South Africa, signed an agreement to stop the docking of vessels used to carry fuel by the Israeli military as well as weapons to the country. That month, a Panamania Cape Friendship vessel moved coal from a South African port and arrived in Israel on March 9, 2025, according to shipping data.

Patrick Bond, a professor at the University of Johannesburg, told PassBlue that South Africa’s trade profile with Israel contradicts its public position on the military operation in Gaza. “If South Africa, which led the call in the ICJ, the UN’s main court, to declare Israel genocidal, still sends coal to Israel, it makes them look like a foolish hypocrite,” he said.

Depending on who is asked, South African officials who spoke with PassBlue blamed the continuous trade with Israel on different arms of the government. The officials said that Pretoria does not impose unilateral sanctions on countries to ensure the continuation of free trade. They say that the country’s legal framework prevents trade restrictions without specific legislation or binding international decisions. But who is responsible for enacting such a law? A legislative official said the executive arm of government must first propose a bill.

Another official who asked not to be named said the opinion of the ICJ and South Africa’s own alliance with The Hague Group are not strong enough grounds to stop trade. He said that without a legal framework in South Africa, such opinions and tripartite agreements are not enforceable and place the burden of responsibility on the Parliament to rectify laws that would allow the executive arm to act.

Moloto Mothapo, the spokesperson for the South African Parliament, which is based in Cape Town, told PassBlue over a call that foreign policy falls under the purview of the executive branch and that any proposed legislative changes would need to be initiated by that entity.

“Foreign policy is the preserve of the executive authority of the state,” Mothapo said. “If there is any law that requires any amendment, they [the executive] will come to Parliament. They will sponsor such a bill or a draft piece of legislation to Parliament.”

Government officials also passed the baton to private companies, whom they said are best positioned to stop sending South African coal to Israel. But the coal shipping companies rely on government infrastructure to move the coal onto cargo ships that transport it to Israel. The Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA), a division of the state-owned Transnet SOC Ltd., a large South African rail, port and pipeline company, is responsible for loading the ships and their cargo.

While Pretoria acknowledges that exporting coal creates “an uncomfortable optics problem,” government sources told PassBlue that banning trade to Israel or restricting the use of public infrastructure simply because of public perceptions and moral principles could potentially open the government to lawsuits from the companies.

“And they will win,” one government official said.

Israeli AI systems assign a grade or number to every person in Gaza, from babies to the elderly, indicating their likelihood of being a Hamas militant. PassBlue corroborated with two separate sources that Palestinians in Gaza are ranked 1 to 100, with no one receiving a 0 or 100 — even babies are labeled somewhere in the middle.

The AI algorithm scans a massive database of information to generate these scores, using input from drones, cameras, spyware and facial-recognition software. The soldiers then use these scores to target individuals. When Israeli forces attack a residence, school or hospital, as it has done throughout the war, it usually happens after the target has been flagged by Israel’s AI and other intelligence systems.

Shir Hever, a political economist and director of the BDS Movement, a Palestinian campaign to boycott, divest and impose sanctions on Israel for its occupation of Palestinian territories, said that Israeli-culled intelligence is sometimes wrong, resulting in the killing of civilians. “The collateral factor for every target is 100. This means Israeli soldiers are allowed to kill 100 civilians in targeting one Hamas militant,” he added.

Jabaliya, the oldest refugee camp in Gaza, was one of the first areas in the north to be bombarded by Israel Defense Forces after the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis and other nationals by Hamas and other Palestinian militants. The camp was created in 1948 by the UN as a temporary site for Palestinian refugees. With a population of about 100,000, living in only 1.4 square kilometers, it has been one of the most densely populated areas in the strip.

On Oct. 9, two days after the Hamas attack, the IDF hit the camp with its first airstrike, followed by a series of military operations that have left Jabaliya flattened, except for heaps of rubble burying thousands of Palestinians. The IDF has carried out at least three extensive military operations in Jabaliya, each exceeding the previous in intensity.

“We had everything in Jabaliya before the war,” said Ihab Suliman, a Palestinian whose house was destroyed in the assaults. “Now everyone lives in a tent on the rubble of their houses.”

The IDF relied on AI and other intelligence-gathering resources to target the area. The Israeli government said the data marked Jabaliya as Hamas’s stronghold. The IDF claims it rooted out more Hamas with every operation, only to return with greater force with the same mission — to neutralize Hamas. But each time Israel claimed it had wiped out Hamas from Jabaliya without evidence of its supposed victory, scores of civilians were killed and civilian buildings were destroyed.

The IDF said on Oct. 14, 2023, that it “targeted terrorist operatives, operational command centers” in Jabaliya and neutralized them with airstrikes. The military had struck a residential building, killing at least 45 people — including a one-month-old baby — two days earlier. Israeli airstrikes obliterated marketplaces, residential buildings and other densely packed sites. While PassBlue could not verify the overall targets of AI-generated intelligence in Jabaliya, casualty numbers show the human and property losses of every hit, whether successful or not.

Meanwhile, a series of street protests have been held in South Africa, calling on the government and the major multinational mining companies to halt exports to Israel. Members of the National Union of Mineworkers and other pressure groups demonstrated at the head office of Glencore, the biggest mining company in South Africa, asking it to stop its supply of coal to Israel.

African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), a mining company founded by Patrice Motsepe — president of the Confederation of African Football and a brother-in-law of both President Cyril Ramaphosa and Energy Minister Jeff Radebe — holds a 51 percent stake in Goedgevonden, a joint venture with Glencore that operates a thermal coal mine in South Africa.

Livhuwani Mammburu, the spokesperson for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), called on all mining companies in the country to consider the implications of their continued business with Israel, particularly in light of the mass killings and civilian casualties, mostly consisting of women and children, inflicted by the IDF operations in Gaza.

“The NUM’s impassioned call to halt coal exports to Israel mirrors a growing and increasingly vocal sentiment within South Africa,” Mammburu said in a statement to PassBlue. “This sentiment advocates for a more consistent alignment between the nation’s trade practices and its strong public condemnation of Israel’s actions on the global stage.”

Damilola Banjo

Damilola Banjo is an award-winning staff reporter for PassBlue who has covered a wide range of topics, from Africa-centered stories to gender equality to UN peacekeeping and US-UN relations. She also oversees all video production for PassBlue. She was a Dag Hammarskjold fellow in 2023 and a Pulitzer Center postgraduate fellow in 2021. She was part of the BBC Africa team that produced the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Sex for Grades.” In addition, she worked for WFAE, an NPR affiliate in Charlotte, N.C. Banjo has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.