On Thursday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least October 8, 2023, to at least May 20, 2024, the date on which the Prosecutor’s Office filed the requests for arrest warrants.”
The order states that Both Netanyahu and Gallant bear “criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts 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” against the Palestinian population.
This marks an important precedent for the ICC, as it is the first time in the court’s 22-year history that it has issued arrest warrants against senior Western-allied officials.
In its statement, ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I, a three-judge panel, said it has rejected Israel’s appeals challenging its jurisdiction.
The 124 member states of the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the court, are now obliged to arrest wanted persons and hand them over to the ICC in The Hague. Trials cannot be started in absentia.
However, the court has no enforcement powers, but relies on the cooperation of member states to arrest and surrender suspects.
The ICC also issued an arrest warrant for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, the Hamas military chief better known as Mohammed Deif (despite Israeli claims that he was killed in Gaza). The ICC’s aim was to seek to “balance the verdict” as if these were crimes of equal scale. The relationship between genocide and the historical violence of a colonialist and apartheid state like Israel, armed by none other than the United States, the world’s leading imperialist power, is incomparable to the action led by Hamas as part of the Palestinian resistance, beyond the differences with its methods and its reactionary strategy of installing a theocratic state.
Although the ICC is not recognized by the United States or Israel, the order represents a major setback for the international image of Israeli colonialism and the genocide it is carrying out with the open support of the United States and the main imperialist countries, as well as the Argentine government of Milei, which defends the massacre of the Palestinian people. Above all, it is a blow against Netanyahu, who could be arrested if he travels outside Israel, and his government, which has been advancing a warlike policy towards Lebanon, and increasing tensions towards the entire region, including Iran, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
The chamber said there are reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population of Gaza of items indispensable to their survival, including food, water, medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least October 8, 2023, through May 20, 2024.”
“This finding is based on Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant’s role in impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law and their failure to facilitate aid through all means at their disposal. The Chamber found that their conduct resulted in the disruption of the ability of humanitarian organizations to provide food and other essential goods to the needy population in Gaza.”
The Chamber therefore found “reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.”
As usual, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office described the arrest order as anti-semitic, as it does with any act that questions the open genocide that has been carried out in Gaza, which has already claimed the lives of almost 45,000 Palestinians, most of them children and women, reduced much of the Strip’s infrastructure to rubble, and forced the displacement of at least 2.3 million inhabitants who are on the brink of famine, as part of its plan for ethnic cleansing.
This article originally appeared in La Izquierda Diario on November 21
Originally Published: 2024-11-22 13:26:28
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