ICC Seeking Arrest Warrants For Sinwar, Netanyahu
By Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are about to join Vladimir Putin in being under international arrest warrants. I leave it up to our legal experts to explain how this works. My understanding is that the primary effect of these arrest warrants limits their travel. Will it affect Netanyahu’s plans to come to Washingto to address the US Congress?
CNN, in an interview with the court’s prosecutor Karim Khan:
Khan said the ICC’s prosecution team is also seeking warrants for Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as two other top Hamas leaders — Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, the leader of the Al Qassem Brigades who is better known as Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader.
Khan said the charges against Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.”
“The world was shocked on the 7th of October when people were ripped from their bedrooms, from their homes, from the different kibbutzim in Israel,” Khan told Amanpour, adding that “people have suffered enormously.”
The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict,” Khan told Amanpour.
“The fact that Hamas fighters need water doesn’t justify denying water from all the civilian population of Gaza,” he added.
The Washington Post is running a liveblog with reaction quotes from a variety of people.
Hamas official Ghazi Hamad told The Washington Post that the group is a “resistance movement and we have the right to resist the occupation and confront it by all legitimate means.”
Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz said Israel is “waging one of the just wars” of history and maintains “one of the strictest moral codes … while complying with international law.”
Israel’s hard-line national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, dismissed the ICC as an “antisemitic court,” while right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich described the decision as a “display of hypocrisy and hatred toward Jews.”