France backs the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the ‘fight against impunity’, its foreign ministry said after the court’s prosecutor sought an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders.
On Monday, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said he had requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders, including its chief, Yahya Sinwar.
If such warrants are issued, however, members of the court, which includes nearly all countries of the European Union, could be put in a diplomatically difficult position.
“France supports the International Criminal Court, its independence and the fight against impunity in all situations”, the foreign ministry said in a statement late on Monday.
While US President Joe Biden called the legal step against Israeli officials “outrageous”, the French foreign ministry took a different stance.
It reiterated both its condemnation of Hamas’s ‘anti-Semitic massacres’ on Oct. 7 as well as its warnings over possible violations of international humanitarian law by Israel‘s invasion of the Gaza strip.
“As far as Israel is concerned, it will be up to the court’s pre-trial chamber to decide whether to issue these warrants, after examining the evidence put forward by the prosecutor … ,” the ministry said.
‘Wilful killing’
The ICC prosecutor said on Monday he had applied for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes including “wilful killing”, “extermination and/or murder”, and “starvation” during the war in Gaza.
Khan said Israel had committed “crimes against humanity”, and accused it “of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population”.
He also said the leaders of Palestinian militant group Hamas, including Qatar-based Ismail Haniyeh and Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, “bear criminal responsibility” for actions committed during the October 7 attack.
These included “taking hostages”, “rape and other acts of sexual violence”, and “torture”, he said.
“International law and the laws of armed conflict apply to all,” Khan said. “No foot soldier, no commander, no civilian leader – no one – can act with impunity.”
(FRANCE 24 with Reuters and AFP)
Categories: Anti-Semitism, Israel, The Muslim Times
More than 900,000 people, approximately 40% of Gaza’s population, have been displaced in the past two weeks as Israeli bombardment continues across much of the enclave, United Nations spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Monday.
The Israeli bombardment has been accompanied by ground incursions and intense fighting, particularly in eastern Rafah and Jabalya, he added.
He said that, of the displaced Palestinians, 812,000 are from Rafah and over 100,000 from northern Gaza.
“To date, more than 75% of the Gaza Strip – some 285 square kilometers – is under evacuation orders amid escalating hostilities,” Dujarric said.
He added that the large-scale displacement has resulted in dire living conditions due to a severe shortage of shelters, with no tents and very few shelter items available for distribution.
Displaced individuals are seeking refuge in open spaces, damaged buildings, and agricultural lands in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah.
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-05-21-24/index.html
Instead of seeing disgraceful and false parallels between, as Israel’s President Isaac Herzog put it, “these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected government of Israel”, human rights groups have applauded the way that the ICC prosecutor is seeking to apply the law to both sides.
B’Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights organisation, said the warrants marked “Israel’s rapid decline into a moral abyss”.
“The international community is signalling to Israel that it can no longer maintain its policy of violence, killing and destruction without accountability,” it added.
Human rights campaigners have complained for many years that powerful Western countries, led by the US, turn a blind eye to Israeli violations of international law, even as they condemn and sanction other states who are not in their camp.
The actions being taken by Mr Khan and his team are, they believe, long overdue.
Mr Khan says that the three main leaders of Hamas committed war crimes that include extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape and torture.
The men named are Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza, Mohammed Deif, the commander of the Qassam Brigades, its military wing, and Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas political bureau.
As part of their investigation, Karim Khan and his team interviewed victims and survivors of the 7 October attacks.
He said Hamas had assaulted fundamental human values: “the love within a family, the deepest bonds between a parent and a child were contorted to inflict unfathomable pain through calculated cruelty and extreme callousness”.
Israel, Mr Khan said, does have the right to defend itself. But “unconscionable crimes” did not “absolve Israel of its obligation to comply with international humanitarian law”.
The failure to do that, he said, justified issuing warrants for the arrest of Mr Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes including starvation of civilians as a weapon of war, murder, extermination, and intentional attacks on civilians.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cw4490z75v3o
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded with predictable vitriol to international criminal court (ICC) accusations against him and the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant. Yet his arguments are all spin, designed to divert attention from their devastating conduct in Gaza. The American, British and German governments were little better.
On Monday, the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced that he would seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant as well as three senior Hamas officials. He proposed charges against the Hamas leadership for atrocities on 7 October as well as the mistreatment of the hostages since then. He proposed charges against the Israeli officials primarily for their efforts to starve the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza. These important proposed charges offer the possibility of breaking through the “wall of impunity” that victims of Israeli and Palestinian abuses have long suffered, as Human Rights Watch put it.
Khan is the ICC’s most experienced chief prosecutor of the three to date. My conversations with him from early in his tenure suggest his approach to his job is conservative. He is unlikely to have pursued charges without solid evidence behind them, as found by a panel of independent experts whom he assembled. The court’s pre-trial chamber is likely to affirm the charges and issue the requested arrest warrants, meaning that the accused could not travel to any of the ICC’s 124 member states, including all of Europe, without facing probable arrest.
The demand for solid evidence is probably why Khan began with Israel’s starvation strategy, because the evidence was more readily available. Israel has barred his investigators from Gaza, where he would ordinarily want to investigate Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate bombing. Khan made clear that his investigation “continues”. More charges could come.
Netanyahu’s response was filled with evasions. He called the proposed charges “an attempt to deny Israel the basic right of self-defense”, which is preposterous. The proposed charges are not about whether Israel can defend itself but how, that is, not by committing war crimes. He said Israel had taken “unprecedented measures … to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches those in need in Gaza” – a claim belied by extensive evidence of Israel’s arbitrary obstruction of food, medicine and other necessities to the civilian population of Gaza, to the point that “famine” has arrived in parts of the territory. Indeed, the US government has been outspoken in criticizing the Netanyahu government for its arbitrary obstruction of humanitarian aid.
In the common last resort for defenders of Israel, Netanyahu accused Khan of “callously pouring gasoline on the fires of antisemitism that are raging across the world”, claiming that “Khan takes his place among the great antisemites in modern times.” This is rich from an Israeli leader who has had no trouble embracing an antisemite – the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán – when it serves him. It also endangers Jews around the world, because if people see the charge of antisemitism as a thin cover for Israeli war crimes, it will cheapen the concept at a time when a strong defense is needed.
Recognizing the independence and the importance of the international criminal court, some governments – notably, France and Belgium – issued statements supporting it. But others followed in Netanyahu’s footsteps.
In a terse statement, Joe Biden called the charges “outrageous”, stating that “there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.” The German government, while saying it “respects the independence” of the court, echoed this “false equivalence” charge. But Khan made no claim of equivalence. He simply charged both Israeli and Hamas officials for their own separate war crimes. Indeed, given the severity of the offenses, it would have been outrageous had Khan ignored one side’s crimes. The dual charges underscore a fundamental principle of international humanitarian law: war crimes by one side never justify war crimes by another.
Ironically, Hamas responded to the proposed charges with a variation of this theme, saying that Khan’s action “equates the victim with the executioner”. But regardless of the perceived justness of one’s cause, it never justifies war crimes.
The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, claimed, without elaborating, that the ICC “has no jurisdiction”. The US government had long opposed the power granted to the court by its founding treaty to prosecute crimes committed in the territory of member states by nationals of non-member states, but Biden abandoned that position when he called the ICC charges against the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for war crimes in Ukraine, using the same territorial jurisdiction, “justified”.
More likely, Blinken was referring to the argument, repeated by the British government, that Palestine could not join the court because it is not a state. But the ICC’s pre-trial chamber has already rejected that argument, citing the UN general assembly’s recognition of Palestine as a “non-member observer state”. Palestine has used that status to ratify a host of human rights treaties, which should be welcomed as a statement of commitment, even if actual practice has often fallen short.
Blinken noted that the ICC, under the principle of complementarity, is supposed to defer to good-faith national prosecutorial efforts. But the Israeli government has never pursued war crime charges against senior officials. Nor, despite Khan’s repeated warnings that he was considering charges regarding Israel’s starvation strategy, have Israeli authorities announced an investigation. Khan said he would reconsider his proposed charges should that change.
Finally, Blinken said that the ICC’s request “could jeopardize” efforts to reach a ceasefire. Similarly, a spokesperson for Rishi Sunak said the charges were “unhelpful”. But there is a long history of war crime charges facilitating peace by marginalizing hardliners. That, for example, was how the Dayton peace accord for the Bosnia conflict was concluded. Similar charges contributed to the emergence of democracy in Liberia and the effective demise of Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army.
Any marginalization of extremist Israeli or Hamas officials might advance the frustratingly stalled ceasefire negotiations. Within Israel, whose officials’ conduct in Gaza has increasingly made it a pariah state in the minds of many worldwide, the proposed charges will strengthen the movement for a leadership change. Far from an impediment to a ceasefire, Khan’s actions could be a spur.
It is disappointing, if not surprising, that the reflexive response to the court’s proposed charges in Washington, London and Berlin was to defend Israel despite its war crimes. But the rule of law does not apply only to one’s adversaries. Nor, as the German government seems to have forgotten, is an appropriate response to the Holocaust defending the Israeli government regardless of what it does rather than affirming human rights standards regardless of who violates them. It is time for these key western governments to reconsider.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/21/icc-benjamin-netanyahu-arrest-warrant
I’m an Israeli historian living in the UK, best known for my books on the history of Palestine and the Middle East, which challenge the official Israeli version of history. This month I was invited to the US by a new Arab American organization, al-Nadwa (the Discussion), to share my thoughts on the situation in the Gaza Strip. I also addressed a Jewish Voice for Peace group in Michigan and went to talk to students encamped at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
After an eight-hour flight from Heathrow I was stopped on arrival at Detroit airport by two people who I thought were agents of the FBI, though I later found out they were agents of the Department of Homeland Security. Two men approached me, flashed their badges and demanded I accompany them into a side room.
My initial attempt to find out why I was stopped was disregarded. It was clear that the agents were asking the questions and my role was to answer them, and not the other way around. So until today, at least officially, I did not receive any explanation for the incident.
I was held for two hours. The first round of questions was about my views on Hamas. Then the agents wished to know whether I thought Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip amount to genocide and what I think of the slogan “Palestine should be free from the river to the sea”. I said yes, I do think Israel is committing genocide. As to the slogan, I said that in my view people anywhere in the world should be free.
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Then the agents interrogated me about who I know in the Arab American and Muslim American community. They asked me to provide them with telephone numbers, took my phone away for quite a long period and asked to wait until they made some phone calls before they let me go.
The point of sharing this experience is not to ask for compassion or even solidarity; there are far worst ordeals in life. But the incident was still troubling – and part of a much larger and more serious phenomenon. Why are ostensibly liberal and democratic countries so interested in profiling or restricting academics who are trying to share our professionally informed views about Israel and Gaza with the North American and European public?
Consider the refusals of both France and Germany to allow Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, the rector of the University of Glasgow, to attend events similar to the ones I attended in the US. In addition to his academic post, Abu Sitta has practiced as a physician in Gaza and is able to provide first-hand testimony about what is happening there on the ground. Human Rights Watch noted that the ban on Abu Sitta, reportedly instigated by Germany, “attempts to prevent him from sharing his experience treating patients in Gaza [and] risks undermining Germany’s commitment to protect and facilitate freedom of expression and assembly and to nondiscrimination”.
The longevity of the lobby in the US and UK pre-empts any free discussion on Israel and Palestine, even in the academy
For my part, I have written more than 20 books about Israel and Palestine, and wished to provide historical and scholarly context to the current situation. Many other well-known and well-versed academics who can provide in-depth analysis, which is not always to be found in the mainstream media, are also affected by the threat or possibility of travel restrictions.
This is a serious issue of academic freedom and freedom of expression. Ironically, in most other contexts, academics are more likely to encounter barriers to free speech in the global south, not the global north. On the topic of Palestine, the situation is reversed. Knowing that, it makes sense that it probably could only have been a state from the global south, such as South Africa, that would dare to approach the international court of justice to seek an injunction against the genocide that Israel is committing in the Gaza Strip.
These travel restrictions have very little to do with knowledge. The American and British governments rarely ever consult any expert who is not Israeli or pro-Israeli about the nature of the conflict in Israel/Palestine and the brutal Israeli policies of the last 76 years.
The British prime minister, for example, has met a Jewish student union since 7 October but shuns any meeting with Palestinian students, many of whom have lost their whole families in Gaza. Antisemitism definitions, such as those outlined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, are weaponized to silence any show of solidarity with the Palestinians. Rishi Sunak might have learned why the slogan “Palestine should be free from the river to the sea” is not idiotic or extremist, as he recently suggested, had he been willing to learn and listen.
Why are we here? I recently finished writing a book titled Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic. In the process I learned that only detailed historical research, which, alas, ended in a rather long book, can explain North American and European politicians’ Pavlovian responses to people’s attempts to exercise their speech rights on the Palestinian struggle.
The longevity of the lobby in the US and UK pre-empts any free discussion on Israel and Palestine, even in the academy. Given Britain’s past responsibility for the Palestinian catastrophe and its present complicity in the crimes committed against Palestinians, this continued repression of free speech prevents a just solution in Israel and Palestine and will put Britain on the wrong side of history. I hope the US, the UK and their allies will change course and prove my prediction wrong.
Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university’s European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/21/ilan-pappe-israel-gaza-zionism