Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) have issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and former defence minister, as well as the military commander of Hamas.
A statement said a pre-trial chamber had rejected Israel’s challenges to the court’s jurisdiction and issued warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.
A warrant was also issued for Mohammed Deif of Hamas, although Israel has said he was killed in an air strike in Gaza in July.
The judges said there were “reasonable grounds” the three men bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas. Both Israel and Hamas have rejected the allegations.
The Israeli prime minister’s office condemned the ICC’s decision as “antisemitic”, while Hamas said the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant set an “important historical precedent”.
The impact of these warrants will in part depend on whether the ICC’s 124 member states – which do not include Israel or its ally, the United States – decide to enforce them or not.
Netanyahu’s most recent overseas trip was to the US in July. Last year, he visited several other countries, including the UK.
The ICC has been part of the global justice system since 2002. It has the authority to prosecute those accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes on the territory of states party to the Rome Statute, its founding treaty.
Israel is not a member of the ICC and rejects its jurisdiction, but the court ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction over the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza because the UN’s secretary general had accepted the Palestinians’ accession to the Rome Statute.
In May, the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan sought warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, Deif and two other Hamas leaders who have since been killed, Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.
Although Israel believes Deif is dead, the chamber said it had been notified by the ICC prosecution that it was not in a position to determine whether he was killed or remained alive.
The prosecutor’s case against them stems from the events of 7 October 2023, when Hamas gunmen attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages.
Israel responded to the attack by launching a military campaign to eliminate Hamas, during which at least 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
For Deif, the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that he was “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”.
It also said there were reasonable grounds to believe the crimes against humanity were “part of a widespread and systematic attack directed by Hamas and other armed groups against the civilian population of Israel”.
For Netanyahu and Gallant, who was replaced as defence minister earlier this month, the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that they “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 also found reasonable grounds to believe that “each bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”.
The Israeli prime minister’s office said Israel “utterly rejects the false and absurd charges of the International Criminal Court”.
It condemned the ICC’s decision as antisemitic and “a modern Dreyfus trial” that would “end the same way” – a reference to the wrongful conviction of a Jewish army officer on trumped-up treason charges in 19th Century France that triggered a national crisis.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not give in to pressure. He will continue to pursue all the objectives that Israel set out to achieve in its just war against Hamas and the Iranian axis of terror,” it added.
There was no immediate reaction from Gallant. But in May he strongly rejected the ICC prosecutor’s arrest warrant requests, saying they had drawn a “despicable” parallel between Israel and Hamas and had attempted to deny his country’s right to self-defence.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog called the chamber’s decision “outrageous”, and said the ICC had “turned universal justice into a universal laughing stock”.
“The decision has chosen the side of terror and evil over democracy and freedom, and turned the very system of justice into a human shield for Hamas’ crimes against humanity,” he added.
Hamas welcomed the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, saying that it “constitutes an important historical precedent, and a correction to a long path of historical injustice against our people”.
It also called on countries around the world to enforce the warrants and work to stop what it called “the crimes of genocide against defenceless civilians in the Gaza Strip”.
Israel has vehemently denied that its forces are committing genocide against Palestinian in Gaza.
©BBC