ICC Issues Arrest Warant on Israeli PM Netanyahu

The International Criminal Court has issued  an arrest warrant against Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.

The ICC is seeking warrants for the Israeli prime minister as well as Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, for war crimes.

The ICC’s chief prosecutor said there were reasonable grounds to believe that both men bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

On Monday, US President  Joe Biden said there was “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas”.

“The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” he said.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed the president’s condemnation, saying Washington “fundamentally rejects” the move. “It is shameful,” he said. “[The] ICC has no jurisdiction over this matter.”

The court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, also applied for arrest warrants for Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh, along with the group’s military chief Mohammed Deif.

He said the alleged crimes begin “from at least 7 October 2023” in the Hamas leaders’ case, when the group launched its attack on Israel, and “from at least 8 October 2023” for the Israeli leaders.

The ICC defended its stance on Monday, saying that despite “significant efforts” it had not received “any information that has demonstrated genuine action at the domestic level [in Israel] to address the crimes alleged or the individuals under investigation”.

A panel of judges at the ICC must now consider whether to issue the warrants and, if they do, countries signed up to the ICC statute are obliged to arrest the men if they have such an opportunity.

Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, condemned the application to seek his arrest as “an absurd and false order”.

In a public statement in Hebrew, he asked “with what audacity” the ICC would “dare to compare” Hamas and Israel.

The comparison was a “distortion of reality”, Mr Netanyahu said.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz called the move by Mr Khan an “unrestrained frontal assault” on the victims of the 7 October attacks and a “historical disgrace that will be remembered forever”.

Hamas earlier made its own demand for “the cancellation of all arrest warrants issued against leaders of the Palestinian resistance”.

“Hamas strongly denounces the attempts of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to equate the victim with the executioner,” the group said.

The group also complained that the application for warrants against Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant had come “seven months late”, and that other Israeli political and military leaders had not been named alongside them.

The accusations against the Israeli and Hamas leaders stem from the events of 7 October, when waves of Hamas gunmen attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 252 others back to Gaza as hostages. The attack triggered the current war, in which at least 35,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Mr Khan accused the Hamas leaders of having committed crimes including extermination, murder, hostage taking, rape and sexual violence, and torture.

He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister were suspected of crimes including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, murder, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, and extermination.

Source: BBC