ICC Arrest Warrants: What They Mean for Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas

Benjamin Netanyahu reacted with fury to the announcement that he could be the subject of an arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This is a “moral outrage of historic proportions,” he said. Israel “is waging a just war against Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that has carried out the worst attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”

In a scathing personal attack, Mr Netanyahu said Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), was one of the “great anti-Semites of modern times”.

Mr. Khan, he said, is comparable to judges in Nazi Germany who denied Jews basic rights and permitted the Holocaust. His decision to seek arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister “pours unceremonious fuel on the fire of anti-Semitism raging around the world.”

Mr. Netanyahu spoke in English in the video released by his office. He does this when he wants his message to reach the foreign audience that matters most to him, namely the United States.

Reacting to the news, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Tuesday called the arrest warrants against him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “shameful” attempt to interfere in the war.

“International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan’s attempt to reverse creation will not succeed – the parallel drawn by the prosecutor between the terrorist organization Hamas and the State of Israel is despicable and disgusting,” he said. he declared in a message posted on X.

Before adding : “The State of Israel is not a party to the Court and does not recognize its authority.”

The outrage expressed by the prime minister, and echoed by Israeli political leaders, was sparked by pages of carefully chosen legal language in a statement issued by Mr. Khan, the ICC prosecutor general who is an adviser to the British king .

Word by word, line by line, they constitute a series of devastating allegations against Hamas’ three top leaders as well as Israel’s prime minister and defense minister.

The determination to apply international law and the laws of armed conflict to all parties is at the heart of Mr. Khan’s statement, which justifies his request for arrest warrants.

“No infantryman, no commander, no civilian leader – no one – can act with impunity. The law, he said, cannot be applied selectively. If so, “we will create the conditions for its collapse.”

It is the decision to subject the conduct of both parties to the model of international law that arouses so much anger, and not only in Israel.

US President Joe Biden said it was “outrageous” to seek arrest warrants. There is “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas”.

Hamas demanded the withdrawal of the allegations against its leaders, saying the ICC prosecutor “put the victim and the executioner on an equal footing.” He said the request to issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders came seven months too late, after “the Israeli occupation had committed thousands of crimes.”

Mr. Khan does not make direct comparisons between the two sides, other than to assert that they have both committed a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He also emphasizes that this latest war takes place in the context of an “international armed conflict between Israel and Palestine, and a non-international armed conflict between Israel and Hamas”.

The Court considers Palestine a state because it has observer status at the United Nations, which allowed it to sign the Rome Statute which gave birth to the ICC.

Mr Netanyahu said the Palestinians would never achieve independence under his leadership.

Instead of drawing shameful and false parallels between, as Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, “these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected Israeli government,” human rights groups applauded the way the ICC prosecutor strives to apply the law to both sides.

B’Tselem, one of Israel’s leading human rights organizations, said the arrest warrants marked Israel’s “rapid decline into a moral abyss.”

“The international community is signaling to Israel that it can no longer maintain its policy of violence, murder and destruction without being held accountable for its actions,” the organization added.

Human rights advocates have complained for many years that powerful Western countries, led by the United States, turn a blind eye to Israel’s violations of international law, even as they condemn and sanction others. other states that are not in their camp.

The actions taken by Mr Khan and his team are, they say, long overdue.

Mr. Khan claims that Hamas’ three main leaders committed war crimes, including exterminations, murder, hostage-taking, rape and torture.

The men named are Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Mohammed Deif, the commander of the Qassam Brigades, its military wing, and Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ political bureau.

As part of their investigation, Karim Khan and his team interviewed victims and survivors of the October 7 attacks.

He said Hamas had undermined basic human values: “The love within a family, the deepest bonds between parent and child, have been twisted to inflict unfathomable pain through calculated cruelty and extreme insensitivity.”

Israel, Mr. Khan said, has the right to defend itself. But “unconscionable crimes” do not absolve Israel of its obligation to comply with international humanitarian law.

This failure justifies the issuance of arrest warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes such as starvation of civilians as a weapon of war, murder, extermination and intentional attacks against civilians.

Since the start of the Israeli response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, President Biden has leveled a series of rebukes at Israel, expressing concern that it is killing too many Palestinian civilians and destroying too much civilian infrastructure in the Strip. from Gaza.

But in a careful balancing act with a close ally he has always supported, Mr. Biden and his administration have not clarified publicly what they mean by that.

Mr. Khan makes his interpretation very clear. According to him, Israel chose criminal means to achieve its war objectives in Gaza, namely “intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering and serious injury” to civilians.

A panel of ICC judges will now consider whether to issue the arrest warrants. States signatories to the Rome Statute of the ICC will then be required to detain these men if they have the opportunity to do so.

Russia, China and the United States are not among the 124 signatories. Israel has not signed either.

But the ICC ruled that it had the legal authority to prosecute criminal acts in the war because the Palestinians are signatories.

If the arrest warrants are issued, it would mean that Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, would not be able to visit his close Western allies without risking arrest.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the ICC’s actions were “not helpful in achieving a pause in the fighting, getting the hostages out or getting humanitarian aid in.” But if the warrants are issued, Britain will have to make the arrests unless it can successfully argue that Mr Netanyahu has diplomatic immunity.

The United States constitutes a major exception for MM. Netanyahu and Gallant. The White House believes the ICC has no jurisdiction in the conflict, a position that could widen the division within Joe Biden’s Democratic Party over the war.

Progressives have already welcomed the ICC’s action. Democrats, Israel’s staunch allies, could support Republican efforts to pass legislation sanctioning ICC officials or barring them from the United States.

A few weeks ago, as rumors of impending indictments circulated in Europe, America and the Middle East, a group of Republican senators issued Mr. Khan and his team the kind of threat they could have hear in a film.

“Target Israel and we will target you…you have been warned.”

Yoav Gallant will also not be able to travel freely. The words he used when announcing that Israel would besiege Gaza have been frequently cited by critics of Israel’s conduct.

Two days after the Hamas attacks, on October 7, Mr. Gallant declared: “I have ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed… we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

Mr. Khan wrote in his statement that “Israel has intentionally and systematically deprived the civilian population in all parts of Gaza of items essential for human survival.”

According to him, famine is present in some parts of Gaza and imminent in others.

Israel denies the existence of a famine, saying that food shortages are not due to its siege, but to Hamas thefts and the incompetence of the United Nations.

If an arrest warrant is issued for Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’s political wing, he will have to think more seriously about his regular trips to meet with top Arab leaders. He is likely to spend much more time at his base in Qatar, which, like Israel, has not signed the Rome statute that created the ICC.

The other two accused Hamas leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, are believed to be hiding somewhere in the Gaza Strip. An arrest warrant does not add much to the pressure put on them. Israel has been trying to kill them for seven months.

The arrest warrant would also place Mr. Netanyahu in a category of accused leaders that also includes Russian President Vladmir Putin and the late Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Mr. Putin is the subject of an arrest warrant for the illegal deportation and transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia.

Before being killed by his own people, Colonel Gaddafi was under arrest warrant for murder and persecution of unarmed civilians.

This is not attractive company for Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of a state that prides itself on its democracy.