The International Criminal Court announced Thursday it had ruled against Israel’s September petition challenging the court’s jurisdiction and issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Alongside the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, the ICC also issued a warrant for the arrest of Hamas senior commander Mohammed Deif. On Aug. 1, the Israeli military announced that Deif was killed in a July 13 airstrike on Khan Younis, but Hamas never confirmed his death.
The ICC accepted prosecutor Karim Khan’s May request to charge Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from Oct. 8 to May 20.
Netanyahu claimed the ICC decision was discriminatory. “The antisemitic decision of the International Criminal Court is a modern Dreyfus trial — and will end the same way,” read a statement issued by his office. “Israel utterly rejects the false and absurd charges of the International Criminal Court, a biased and discriminatory political body,” it read, adding that the decision to issue the warrants was made “by a corrupt chief prosecutor who is trying to save himself from sexual harassment accusations and biased judges who are motivated by antisemitic hatred of Israel,” referring to the ICC’s Nov. 11 decision to launch an external investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Khan, who has denied any wrongdoing.
The statement released by the ICC read that the court “found reasonable grounds to believe” that Netanyahu and Gallant “each 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.” It went on, “The alleged crimes against humanity were part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.”
The statement stressed that international humanitarian law relating to international armed conflict between Israel and Palestine applies to the period in question, which is why it rejected Israel’s jurisdiction challenge and decided to issue the warrants.
The ICC classified the arrest warrants secret in order to protect witnesses and to safeguard the conduct of the investigations. As such, the statement of the court does not go into details on the changes against Netanyahu, Gallant and Deif.
“Both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity,” the ICC wrote about Netanyahu and Gallant, adding that “by intentionally limiting or preventing medical supplies and medicine from getting into Gaza, in particular anaesthetics and anaesthesia machines, the two individuals are also responsible for inflicting great suffering by means of inhumane acts on persons in need of treatment.”
On Deif, the court said he was suspected of “crimes against humanity and war crimes committed on the territory of the State of Israel and the State of Palestine from at least 7 Oct. 2023.” The ICC believes he “is responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other form of sexual violence; as well as the war crimes of murder, cruel treatment, torture; taking hostages; outrages upon personal dignity; and rape and other form of sexual violence.”
The ICC added that members of Hamas “carried out mass killings at and/or around the communities of Kfar Aza, Holit, Nir Oz, Be’eri, and Nahal Oz, as well as at the Supernova festival. The attackers, for example, fired at people while they were seeking shelter and threw grenades at them. Hamas fighters followed similar patterns in other locations and killed further persons. These killings qualify as the crime against humanity and the war crime of murder.”
The arrest warrants affect all the member states of the ICC, which means that Netanyahu and Gallant can no longer travel to these countries, where they could be detained upon arrival. Israel and the United States are not members of the ICC, but most European countries are.
Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the Israeli opposition party Yisrael Beitenu, was the first Israeli official to react to the ICC announcement. “The court in the Hague supplied today yet another proof to the double standard and hypocrisy of the international community and United Nations institutions,” Lieberman said, adding, “The State of Israel will not apologize for defending its citizens. It is committed to continuing battling terror without making any concessions.”
What the ruling means
Professor Yuval Shany is a professor of international law at the Jerusalem Hebrew University and chair of the United Nations Human Rights Committee since 2018. He noted to Al-Monitor that the warrants were issued after an especially long deliberation and that the judges found there were reasonable grounds for charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not enough evidence on the charge of extermination.
Shany explained that in concrete terms, the ICC decision means that if Netanyahu and Gallant travel to one of the 124 member states of the ICC, they will risk arrest. However, he pointed out that Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Mongolia last September and was not arrested there despite an international arrest warrant.
Shany said that Gallant and Netanyahu’s warrants could be canceled in the future, but there is no way of knowing how the case will develop. “In any case, there are no ICC trials in absentia. What the prosecutor can do is to ask the court to reaffirm the charges. This bears symbolic meaning but does not constitute a trial.”
“The ICC for the moment is keeping the warrants secret. This means that the court is not publishing the evidence and the specific incidents against Netanyahu and Gallant,” he added.
This developing story has been updated since initial publication.
