Netanyahu Wanted for War Crimes
Benjamin Netanyahu has become the first leader of a “western-style” democracy to have an arrest warrant issued in his name by the international criminal court.
A panel of ICC judges said there are “reasonable grounds to believe” Israel’s prime minister and former defense minister are guilty of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare” and other “crimes against humanity.”
“The Chamber issued warrants of arrest for two individuals, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the Prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest,” the panel said, specifically alleging “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare” and “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
The announcement came as the official death toll from Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip surpassed 44,000.
The ICC judges said they “found reasonable grounds to believe” that Netanyahu and Gallant “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 panel also said it “found reasonable grounds to believe that no clear military need or other justification under international humanitarian law could be identified for the restrictions placed on access for humanitarian relief operations.”
“Finally, the Chamber assessed that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population of Gaza,” the judges added.
The International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, (and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri) is a game-changer in many ways.
First, it puts paid to Israel’s obsessive belief that it is in the right and has international support. Israel and Netanyahu are pariahs.
Second, it puts Israel’s closest allies in a severe predicament. How Britain and other countries respond will be very telling for them – and may have legal implications as aiders and abetters. As Ousman Noor, a human rights lawyer and Co-Director of Civilian Agenda has put it:
“AIDING AND ABETTING war crimes are also war crimes. This can involve providing assistance, encouragement, or support that has a substantial effect on the commission of a war crime. For example: Supplying weapons or resources. Providing intelligence or logistical support.”
Third, by issuing an arrest warrant for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri it closed off the ridiculous defence that any action is anti-semitic.
The panel issued a separate statement announcing an arrest warrant for Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, saying it found “reasonable grounds to believe” 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 forms of sexual violence.”
What happens next is crucial. Already Israel’s key allies within Britain have gone on the defensive. Priti Patel has come out saying: “In issuing these warrants, the ICC are drawing a moral equivalence with the actions of the terrorist leadership of Hamas, which it is wrong to do. The Conservative Government did not believe the ICC has jurisdiction in this area, as Israel is not a signatory to the Rome statute, and because Palestine is not recognised as a state. The Labour Government must condemn and challenge the ICC’s decision.”
Well yes, they ARE drawing a moral equivalence between state terrorism and non-state terrorism.
In contrast, former FM Humza Yousaf has said: “The ICC has made it clear that international law applies equally to us all. No one should be above the law. This is the moment we find out who believes in the equal application of international law versus those who pay lip service to it.”
Similarly, Jeremy Corbyn, called the ICC arrest warrants “long overdue” and urged the government of Keir Starmer to “immediately endorse this decision.”
“That is the bare minimum,” Corbyn wrote on social media. “Will the U.K. government now, finally, honor its international obligations to prevent genocide and end all arms sales to Israel?”
Again Britain, now under a Labour government is an outlier, unable to even comply with international agreements it is a signatory to:
Interviewer: Will Netanyahu be arrested if he comes to the UK?
Govt minister Yvette Cooper: “That’s not a matter for me…”
“The UK is a signatory of the ICC, don’t we have to respect its ruling?”
“… it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment” pic.twitter.com/YQkztoFIUA
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) November 22, 2024
Again, post-Brexit Britain is an outlier.
The ICC relies on 124 member states of the Rome statute, which established the court, to execute arrest warrants. Member states are obliged to arrest individuals wanted by the ICC who set foot on their territory and, while they do not always do so, it means that the accused will have to consider whether they are willing to risk traveling.
Netanyahu and Gallant are at risk of arrest if they travel to any of the 124 countries that signed the Rome statute establishing the court.
Ireland said it would be prepared to arrest Netanyahu if he came to the country, prime minister Simon Harris said.
“Yes absolutely. We support international courts and we apply their warrants,” Harris told national broadcaster RTE on Friday when asked if Netanyahu would be arrested if he arrived in Ireland for whatever reason.
Yesterday Italy said it would have to arrest Netanyahu if he came to the country.
Following the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), founded on the Rome Statute, in an interview with Rai, Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said his country would be obliged to arrest Netanyahu if he visited.
Although Italy’s government said it believed the ICC was “wrong”, Crosetto said that if Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant “were to come to Italy, we would have to arrest them” under international law.
“By joining the Court, we must apply its judgments, it is part of the treaty,’’ he said.
Switzerland has joined the Netherlands in announcing that they will arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu & transfer him to the International Criminal Court if he enters their country.
Netherlands ready to enforce ICC warrant against Netanyahu.
Foreign Min. Veldkamp: “The Netherlands obviously respects the independence of the ICC. … We are obliged to cooperate with the ICC and we will also do that. We abide 100% by the Rome Statute.”pic.twitter.com/ubWdsXF0nl
— Martin Konečný (@MartinKonecny) November 21, 2024
Incredibly, under a Labour government, Britain is being left as an outlier, internationally isolated in complicity with a regime accused of war crimes. As the activist Jonathon Shafi has written: “Three possible reasons why the ICC, normally an instrument of the West, issued arrest warrants. 1) The scale of the crime is too grave to conceal. 2) US power, in relative terms, is weakening in the global system. 3) The vigilance of the international movement, in all its forms.”
In this next moment the international movement, particularly in states like the UK must bring enormous pressure to bear to have this arrest warrant enforced. All that is asking is that Britain complies with its own international legal agreements.
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The British Empire is an outlier in many respects, partly stemming from our royal prerogative (the monarch is both above the law and is the authority on international treaties):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative_in_the_United_Kingdom#Foreign_affairs
I have been reading Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (2018, 2019) which depicts how much the uncodified Israeli constitution draws on the British Mandate (still using oppressive anti-media legislation and culture of self-censorship from that era today), and reflects something of the British quasi-constitution. Not only is Israel a jurisdiction which is a law unto itself, its cabinet, its PM, and sections of its military-intelligence-security complex are also laws unto themselves.
As Bergman puts it (p31):
“Israeli intelligence from the outset occupied a shadow realm, one adjacent to but separate from the country’s democratic institutions” without effective supervision from the Knesset (Parliament) etc. Sound familiar? Decades of unaccountability have produced a monster (just like the MoD is a monstrous international outlier in the UK). A culture of ‘anything goes’ for national security: racist surveillance, torture, perjury in the courts and concealment of truth from legal authorities, extrajudicial killings replacing death penalty. All leading to the open genocide we see.
The disgust, nausea and problem I have is that the conduct of Israel is there for all to see!
It’s not as if Israel cares, regrets or in any way will apologise for its actions, and in doing so relies upon support from uk and US.
Our Scottish taxes to uk and Scottish reputation is being used to provide Israel cover!
And we can do nothing about it, what an awful state of affairs!
No surprise that Labour find it difficult to support ICC decision — 30% of the MPs and cabinet are arselicking members of Labour Friends of Israel. They neglect their constituents to spend their time advocating for another country. Rewarded with sunshine tours to Tel Aviv and loads of donations to party funds
This decision by the ICC further demonstrates the importance of international institutions, which have come under fire recently, notably from the USA under Trump’s previous presidency. We can expect Trump 2.0 to go after them again.
But I can’t agree with Jonathon Shafi’s description of the ICC as ‘normally an instrument of the West’. For a start, neither the USA nor Israel are not party to it, whereas the state of Palestine is. The reality is that many powerful countries, whether aligned to the West or not, which are engaged in violent suppression of movements for self-determination have never wanted their nefarious activities to be subject to any international sanction or scrutiny – including Russia, over Ukraine, and now Israel, over Palestine, both of whose leaders are now rightly subject to ICC arrest warrants.
Typo: for a start, neither the USA nor Israel are party to it.
‘Israel and Netanyahu are pariahs.’. Really, the whole of Israel and everyone in it no matter their politics or whether the government changes hue? I’ll certainly grant you Netanyahu and Gallant should be considered pariahs by all reasonably minded people if they refuse to step forward to answer the charges and have their innocence proved. But a whole country and its residents?
As for by ‘issuing an arrest warrant for Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri it closed off the ridiculous defence that any action is anti-semitic.’ I rather suspect the Court wasn’t overly interested in political theatre or performative acts here; not least as it’d be very damaging for any court’s credibility to do such a thing. It wasn’t anti-semitic because, well there’s not one single shred of evidence evidence that it is, was, or ever could be considered such.
If the benchmark for antisemitism is the issuance of an arrest warrant by a court against any Israeli or Jewish citizen, the there’s probably not a country in the world whose judicial system isn’t antisemitic. Especially in Israel itself. The howls of those attempting to create confusion and cover because justice is blind and they’re being asked to answer for an action is no reason why we should be playing their game for them.
Just saying.
As has been pointed out at various times, everything Hitler did was legal. I bring this to our attention because whether an act or series of acts is criminal might not be the same as whether it is legal. Laws protecting and indeed promulgating criminal behavior are far from unprecedented, even in “advanced” and “civilized” nations, the criminality being the de facto injury to others via the laws that bear upon the situation. I’m thinking, for example, of the long-running miscegenation laws in the United States, where it was illegal to marry or have sexual relations in a white/nonwhite combination. People were prosecuted and punished for this violation of law, but the only criminality entailed, I submit, was the existence and enforcement the laws themselves.
Netanyahu and his coterie of capos his protected by laws embedded in racism. The resultant criminality is a function of prevailing power relations, those wielding supreme coercive power acting as one with the racist ethos defining the state and practice of Israeli rule. Legal they are, criminal as well. The ICC holds to a standard where racist violence is not acceptable. Unfortunately, the question Hitler once posed when asked about the approval of the Pope–“How many divisions has the Pope?”–is the one that determines reality on the ground, and as we know, the ground in Gaza and now throughout the Middle East wherever Israel chooses to strike, is saturated with the criminal results of its actions.
@Daniel Raphael I am pretty sure Adolf Hitler had a criminal record:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Hall_Putsch#Trial_and_prison
and committed further crimes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic#End_of_the_Weimar_Republic
although I take your general point (the Allies committed many moral crimes during WW2 that they didn’t put themselves on trial for afterwards).
I think the point about breaking cycles of violence is that if you don’t hold out hope of justice, then these might not end except in genocide and possibly nowadays Armageddon. But justice delayed too much is justice denied and all that. Will the European Empires ever be held accountable for their multitudinous crimes? When Charles Windsor is sitting atop a vast pile of colonial loot and domestic dispossession? When Emmanuel Macron is rude about Haitians instead of paying back the vast sums of money France extorted?
And empires do fall. Maybe even the British Empire one day. Maybe all of them.
This is from Just Security ‘Nuts & Bolts of the International Criminal Court Arrest Warrants in the ‘Situation in Palestine’
https://www.justsecurity.org/105048/icc-arrest-warrants/
Q-2: What are the key allegations in the arrest warrants and for what crimes are Netanyahu and Gallant’s arrests sought?
A. The information released by the Pre-Trial Chamber includes a summary of the crimes for which the individuals’ arrests are sought. (As identified below, however, there are conspicuous gaps between the Prosecutor’s request and the press release description of the Pre-Trial Chamber’s issuance of warrants.)
Specifically, the arrests of Netanyahu and Gallant are sought for the following crimes.
As co-perpetrators:
The war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare (here through impeding humanitarian relief in violation of international humanitarian law and in a way that intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of food, water, medicine, and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024);
The crime against humanity of murder (here through the aforementioned deprivation creating “conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza, which resulted in the death of civilians, including children due to malnutrition and dehydration”);
The crime against humanity of inhumane acts (here in the form of inflicting great suffering through the deprivation of medical supplies and medicines);
The crime against humanity of persecution—the discriminatory deprivation (here on national or political grounds) of fundamental rights (here the rights to life and health).
As civilian superiors, responsible for their subordinates:
The war crime of directing attacks at a civilian population.
The key allegation made by the Prosecutor in relation to Netanyahu and Gallant that is not included in the arrest warrant is that of extermination (a crime against humanity). The warrants also appear to omit the Prosecutor’s allegations relating to the war crimes of wilfully killing and wilfully inflicting great suffering or serious injury to body or health, although this may well be an imprecision in the press release. More on these points below.
Deif’s arrest is sought for:
The war crime of hostage-taking (starting on October 7th, when a “large number of persons” were seized from various locations in Israel, including Kfar Aza, Holit, Nir Oz, Be’eri, Nahal Oz, and the Supernova festival, and continuing into Gaza, where they were detained in secret locations; the press release notes that “a number of hostages” appear still to be held captive);
In relation to the attacks of October 7th:
The war crime of directing attacks at a civilian population (here through attackers firing at people with semi-automatic weapons and/or rocket-propelled grenades, particularly at the site of the Supernova festival and in its vicinity);
Murder as a war crime and as a crime against humanity (here through mass killings at or around the communities of Kfar Aza, Holit, Nir Oz, Be’eri, and Nahal Oz, as well as at the Supernova festival);
The crime against humanity of extermination (through the same mass killings that underpin the murder allegation, which were found to be coordinated across locations);
In relation to sexual and gender-based violence inflicted on certain hostages in Gaza (“predominantly women”):
Torture and cruel treatment, as war crimes and crimes against humanity;
Rape and sexual violence, as war crimes and crimes against humanity;
The war crime of outrages upon personal dignity.
In addition to the name and identifying information of each individual and the crimes for which their arrest is sought, each warrant will have included a concise statement of the facts that underpin those criminal allegations (ICC Statute, article 58(3)(c)). On this, the press releases included only limited details. From those details, it is notable that the Pre-Trial Chamber approved warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in relation to two specific direct attacks on civilian populations, without specifying which attacks those were. The press release associated with the Prosecutor’s request for warrants in May referred to “attacks on civilians, including those queuing for food; obstruction of aid delivery by humanitarian agencies; and attacks on and killing of aid workers, which forced many agencies to cease or limit their operations in Gaza.” However, we do not know which two attacks meeting this description the Chamber found to be supported by sufficient evidence to ground that component of the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Among the most high-profile events that might have been included in this category are the so-called “flour massacre” of Feb. 29, when at least 112 people were killed and 760 injured, and the attack on a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers on April 1. Importantly, the theory of the case here is not that Netanyahu or Gallant ordered these attacks. Rather, it is that they criminally failed “to prevent or repress” the commission of these crimes.
And, not to be forgotten, there are also the ‘criminal’ actions of oppression and occupation, the forceful and brutal removal of people from their homes in Palestinian Territories, over decades, all with the tacit backing of the USA, supported by the UK and other allies.
There was an English guy who led a political party who had roughly the same view as you, it led to character assassination using untruths, I wonder what happened to him?
The bbc led the charge on this too!
Good old aunty, she knows how to keep the pleads in their place!
Perhaps I’m missing your point.
Are you saying that there has not been oppression and occupation of Palestine territories at the hand of the state of Israel?
Corbyn was targeted the same way the SNP has been targeted by the MSM, bbc and state machinery. Because they all saw him as a threat to the status quo!
They finally got him when they could hang antisemitism round his neck.
I don’t believe him to be an antisemite, merely someone who has many talents to get a convincing message across but someone who should never have led a party!
They got him because they could conflate antisemitism with speaking out against the Israeli Government, much and such as Labour themselves have dumbed down debate on war crimes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank!
Even when crimes are being witnessed on our TV screens each evening, those in Westminster seek to obfuscate, hide and lie, it’s the way the uk political system works, supported by the establishment, MSM and bbc!
Yes.
Did you have to be so oblique?
I think you’re referring to Corbyn, but you haven’t exactly made it obvious.
“oblique?”
Whom else could it be?
What other English party leader spoke truth to power and faced character assassination on a daily basis?