President Joe Biden denounced as “outrageous” the International Criminal Court’s announcement on Monday that it intends to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders and charge them with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“And let me be clear: Whatever this prosecutor may suggest, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas,” Biden said in a statement.
Biden’s blunt response to the ICC’s announcement that it intends to hold Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders accountable, along with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and other Hamas leaders The October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas and the subsequent invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces was repeated by the top US diplomat, Antony Blinken.
“It’s shameful,” Blinken said. “Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization that carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and still holds dozens of people hostage, including Americans.”
The reaction came several hours after ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim AA Khan said in a declaration that he was “filing arrest warrant requests” for Netanyahu, Sinwar and other senior Israeli and Hamas figures who played important roles in the ongoing war in Gaza.
While the targeted Israeli and Hamas leaders are unlikely to be prosecuted, the arrest warrants could make it difficult for them to travel abroad and a court trial would be especially embarrassing for the Israeli government, experts said.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant also faces potential arrest as pressure continues on Israel, both internally and externally, to halt its military offensive in Gaza and secure a ceasefire and release agreement for hostages with Hamas.
Khan said that both Netanyahu and Gallant are criminally responsible for a list of “war crimes”, including starvation of civilians, deliberately “causing great suffering or serious injury”, intentional homicides and intentionally targeted attacks against a civilian population .
“We affirm that the crimes against humanity charged were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population, in accordance with state policy,” Khan wrote in the ICC statement, adding that his office has evidence extensive, including videos and interviews with survivors. . “These crimes, in our assessment, continue to this day.”
Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, commander-in-chief of Hamas’ military wing, and Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political office, also face ICC arrest warrants for their role in the October 7 attacks.
“We assert that the charged crimes against humanity were part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Israel by Hamas and other armed groups in accordance with organizational policies,” Khan wrote. “Some of these crimes, in our assessment, continue to this day.”
Israel’s leadership has been working through diplomatic channels to prevent the issuance of the ICC warrants, an Israeli official told NBC News in April.
Netanyahu called the ICC announcement “absurd.”
“How audaciously do you dare compare the monsters of Hamas to the soldiers of the IDF, the most moral army in the world?” Netanyahu said in a statement. “How audaciously you compare between Hamas who murdered, burned, butchered, raped and kidnapped our brothers and sisters, and the IDF soldiers who are fighting a just war that is unmatched in morality.”
There was no immediate comment from Gallant on Monday’s development.
But Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz, a political rival of Netanyahu who recently threatened to resign from the government if it did not adopt a new plan for the war in Gaza, condemned the ICC’s announcement.
“Putting the leaders of a country that entered the battle to protect its citizens in the same line as bloodthirsty terrorists – is moral blindness and a violation of their duty and ability to protect their citizens,” he said in a post on X .
The Forum for Families of Hostages and Missing Persons, which represents the families of those taken hostage by Hamas during the October 7 attacks, said in a statement that it was also “not comfortable with the equivalence drawn between Israel’s leadership and the terrorists of Hamas.”
In a statement, Hamas separately denounced “the attempts by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to equate the victim with the executioner by issuing arrest warrants against several leaders of the Palestinian resistance.”
“Experienced observers” of the ICC expected the court to issue warrants “not just against Israeli officials but also against Hamas leaders,” international law expert Brian Finucane told NBC News in a telephone interview on April 29, before the judgment. warrants were issued.
The ICC – based in The Hague, Netherlands – can charge individuals with war crimes and other related charges. It is separate from the International Court of Justice, which considers cases between states and is currently investigating whether Israel committed acts of genocide in Gaza.
Three years ago, the ICC launched an investigation into possible war crimes committed by Israeli and Palestinian militants since the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.
At the time, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the US had “serious concerns” about the investigation.
This investigation was launched after the Palestinians, who joined the court in 2015, asked the ICC to investigate Israeli actions during the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, as well as the construction of settlements in the occupied West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem. Much of the world considers settlements illegal under international law.
It is unclear exactly when the ICC launched its investigation into Israel’s Gaza offensive, which began after Hamas’ attack on the country on October 7 left 1,200 dead and around 250 people taken hostage. Health officials in Gaza say more than 35,000 have died since then.
Khan visited the region in December and said his investigation was “moving forward at a rapid pace, with rigor, with determination and with the insistence that we act not on the basis of emotion, but on the basis of solid evidence”.
Human rights advocates and experts in the region welcomed Monday’s development.
“The State of Israel is on trial at the ICJ, its leaders are subject to an indictment at the ICC, its allies are subject to cases in national courts, independent human rights mechanisms have condemned them and millions are on the streets demanding justice ,” Craig Mokhiber, a former senior United Nations human rights official, said in a publish in X on Monday. “Justice is Coming.”
Mokhiber, who was director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, resigned from his post in November in protest at the UN’s failure to condemn what he called “textbook genocide” by the Israeli military against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Finucane, who is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law, told NBC News that Israel, like the U.S., does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction.
He said neither country is party to the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC. But he added that the warrants would put Israeli authorities at risk of arrest in other countries, including much of Europe.
“In practice, ICC arrest warrants could function as a travel ban,” said Finucane, who served as legal counsel in the State Department’s Office of the General Counsel during the Obama and Trump administrations. “Parties to the Rome Statute who become members of the International Criminal Court have an obligation to act in accordance with arrest warrants,” she added.
The warrants also placed Netanyahu, on the international stage, in a similar position to that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for him in March 2023, accusing him of being responsible for war crimes in Ukraine. .
Finucane said that at the time, President Joe Biden “welcomed that announcement and said he thought it was justified.”
He added that he hopes the ICC decision “will provide yet another reason for the US government to think hard about its continued unconditional military support for Israel.”
“This conflict in Gaza has been disastrous not only for the people of Israel and Palestine, but also for the entire region,” he said.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
