What a difference a comma can make.

Minutes after the International Court Of Justice’s ruling was read out last week, media rushed to announce that it had ordered Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah.

Properly understood, though, that is not what the written English version of the order actually says.

Here is the exact wording:

50. The Court considers that, in conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Note the last comma. Interpreted correctly, that statement means that the pursuit of Israel's military offensive and other action in and around Rafah must not inflict conditions of life that could bring about the Palestinian group's physical destruction in whole or in part.

In other words: Israel can proceed to act militarily in Rafah but has to be very careful in doing so not to destroy the Palestinian population in whole or in part.

The fact that the ICJ has, as it were, courted misinterpretation is frustrating - but it is becoming a pattern. The way it phrased its judgment in January was almost universally reported as saying that Israel was conducting "plausible genocide". Yet to the evident surprise of the presenter of the BBC's Hardtalk programme on which she was interviewed, the just-retired president of the ICJ, Joan Donoghue, said this was an incorrect interpretation.

All her court had ruled, she said, was that South Africa had established a plausible right to take Israel to the next and much more substantial phase of a genocide trial. That is a huge difference, but neither the BBC itself nor any other news agency, let alone vituperative UN officials, have apologised for their own, shall we say, misjudgment.

Lawyers can in future argue over the latest ICJ ruling, and try to determine how much death and severe injury, and harm to the “conditions of life”, constitute the destruction that the court may later define as genocidal.

If there had been no comma then the long and convoluted sentence would indeed have been a ruling that no offensive in and around Rafah is allowed.

But there is a comma. Now lawyers may need to check the French language version to see if it has that same comma. Maybe the French version means something different. But as the president of the court delivered the Judgment in English it is likely the printed English-language version prevails.

This significant difference caused by the presence or absence of a punctuation mark has some historical parallel: the argument over the meaning of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (1967). It had ordered Israel - subject to conditions like the establishment of secure and recognised boundaries - to withdraw from 'territories' it had occupied in the Six Day War.

The French version however uses the phrase: “retrait...des territoires” (withdraw from ...the territory). That could have meant, as Arab nations interpreted it, all the territory. It turned out that the English-language version, drafted by Lord Caradon, took precedence - which has been a great boon to Israel's contentions that since 1967 it has the right to control parts of the West Bank and Gaza.

Even more so, the current ICJ case is - literally - punctuated with doubt.

Paul Cainer qualified as a barrister in South Africa and has written frequently on the legal aspects of international disputes.