Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s planned two-day visit to Israel starting February 25, which will include an address to the Knesset, comes at a moment of extraordinary international scrutiny for the Israeli government. Far from being a routine diplomatic engagement, the trip risks being read globally as a political endorsement of a leadership facing allegations of war crimes and genocide over its conduct in Gaza.

The visit will place Modi alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant, citing reasonable grounds to believe he bears criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Proceedings related to Israel’s actions in Gaza are also underway at the International Court of Justice, which in January 2024 ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention.

PM Modi last visited Israel in 2017, the first ever by an Indian prime minister, when the two leaders famously walked barefoot side by side on a beach to inspect a desalination facility. The following year, Netanyahu returned the favour, with a 6-day state visit. But what might once have been framed as the natural progression of a deepening India–Israel partnership now carries far heavier implications – for India’s global standing, its claims to leadership in the Global South, and its stated commitment to a rules-based international order.

Diplomatic ties

India’s relations with Israel has undergone a massive change since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1992. Bilateral trade, excluding defence, peaked at 10.77 billion dollars in 2022-23; with subsequent declines due to regional security issues and disruptions to trade routes. The big change has been in defence deals, with India becoming Israel’s biggest customer for arms. 

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), estimates that between 2020 and 2024 India accounted for 34 percent of Israel’s defence exports buying 20.5 billion dollars worth of armaments during this period. And since 2014 there has been a growing affinity between a Zionism-driven Israeli state and a Hindutva-based regime in New Delhi. 

In 2025, India welcomed an Israeli leader Bezalel Smotrich despite the ban on him in the EU for his inflammatory and extremist statements against Palestinians in the West Bank, and his promotion of the expansion of illegal settlements.

However, there is a reason why this forthcoming visit by India’s prime minister will not be seen as merely a continuation.

The genocide

The big change since the first prime ministerial visit to Israel has been the brutal destruction by the Israeli Defence Force of Gaza – an open-air prison in which some 2 million Palestinians had been hemmed in for decades and forced to depend on external aid and subject to humiliations of a ruthless occupation.

The Israeli government has now accepted the figures put out by Hamas, that their genocidal assault on Gaza killed 70,000 people, a high proportion of them children, but experts warn that the true casualty figure is probably much higher. Images of  widespread damage and near total destruction of vast swathes of the densely built up Gaza are commensurate with expert estimates that the bombing of Gaza was worse than the carpet bombing in World war II of Dresden, involving the equivalent of 70,000 tons of TNT explosive, equal to 6 Hiroshimas.    

It all escalated with a war that was provoked by the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 254 hostages taken. Though those events are still shrouded in confusion and controversy. A lot has also been written about Israel’s actions in the months and years since the October 7 attack, and the overwhelming consensus among international bodies, acadmics, independent jounalists, and legal and genocide experts is that it has been disproportionate and lethal enough to meet the UN International Genocide Convention’s legal tests for genocide. 

In an opinion piece earlier this month in Haaretz, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote, “A violent and criminal effort is underway to ethnically cleanse territories in the West Bank. Gangs of armed settlers persecute, harm, wound and even kill Palestinians living there. The rampages include burning olive groves, houses and cars; breaking into homes; and physically assaulting people.” He continued: “The rioters, the Jewish terrorists, storm Palestinians with hate and violence with one objective: to force them to flee from their homes. All this is done in the hopes that the land will then be prepared for Jewish settlement, en route to realizing the dream of annexing all the territories.”

Two years ago, on January 26, 2024, the International Court of Justice, in a 15-2 majority verdict, ruled that in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, Israel must, “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II [of] the [Genocide] Convention”. The ‘acts’ referred to are: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” 

Though a final verdict from the ICJ has been delayed, until at least July 2027, and possibly beyond even that date. 

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former defence minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas commander Mohammed Deif – proceedings against Deif terminated after his death last year. The court found reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant “bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.

These charges are of course denied by Israel, and even the jurisdiction of the court is contested both by Israel and the United States. Trump has ordered sanctions against the ICC judges and prosecutors, in acts described by a Human Rights group as an “attack on the rule of law”, and with sanctions against judges that have “upended the [personal] lives of judges” by preventing their access to email, credit cards, and online transactions. 

Implications for Modi’s visit

It is against this background of Israel’s crimes against humanity, the mounting political opposition facing Netanyahu, and the indictment by the ICC that we need to consider the implications of PM Modi’s forthcoming visit. 

At a time when many governments around the world are facing public backlash, Modi is lucky to face little or no opposition within India over continued links with Israel. The two leaders on Sunday exchanged warm messages on X that belie the storm of condemnation swirling around Israel and its leader. But a personal visit to Israel and an address to the Knesset, will be seen around the world as India’s unconditional support for, and complicity with, Israel’s acts of genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

This will come at a time when other countries and groupings are trying to build pressure on Israel over the situation in Gaza.

Twelve countries from the Global South earlier came together to announce sanctions against Israel. 

Then there is the Hague Group, an international bloc committed to “coordinated legal and diplomatic measures” in defence of international law and solidarity with the Palestinian people. 

The context for these measures is documented. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine has published several reports documenting the “unfolding horrors in Palestine”; these include, the wholesale destruction of Gaza (this has continued even after the so-called ceasefire deal), the forced displacement and replacement of Palestinian people in Palestine. Albanese called upon states to “intervene now to prevent new atrocities that will further scar human history”. 

For PM Modi to reward Israel with an official visit, a much publicised meeting with Netanyahu to discuss deepening business relations, and to address the Knesset would be a betrayal of the international efforts to promote peace, international human rights, justice for the victims of deliberate state-sponsored genocidal violence, and solidarity with the Global South. 

The international rules based order may have collapsed as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in Davos, but India should be part of the solution to restore a system of international justice, especially for poorer countries and the victims of erstwhile colonial misadventures of the last century, rather than join a cabal of a new Eurocentric white supremacist settler-colonialism as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in Munich. 

And at the centre of that revived European domination lies Israel rapidly becoming this century’s apartheid white South Africa, as Thomas Friedman warned in this New York Times piece.

In September last year, India was among 142 nations that voted for a UN General Assembly Resolution backing the New York Declaration that re-affirmed the call for a two-state solution. More recently, after some early vacillation, India finally put its name to a 100-nation statement criticising Israel for its deliberate expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. 

India should give substance to its stated principles by, at the very least, avoiding any gesture that appears to endorse Israel’s conduct. Yet that is precisely the message the forthcoming visit risks conveying – one that could tarnish India’s reputation and erode its carefully cultivated soft power.

If India is seen to stand openly beside a government accused of carrying out a genocide in full global view, it weakens its claim to moral leadership. A country that aspires to champion a renewed rules-based international order, speak for the Global South, and secure a permanent seat on the UN Security Council cannot afford to appear indifferent to – or complicit in – grave violations of international law.

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