The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has applied for arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and the leaders of Hamas on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Karim Khan said he had applied for warrants for Mr Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defence minister, for alleged crimes that include the deliberate starvation of Palestinians as a weapon of war.
Hamas leaders including Yahya Sinwar, the terrorist organisation’s leader, have been accused of crimes including “extermination”, “rape and other acts of sexual violence” and “taking hostages”.
The decision comes after a months-long investigation into the Oct 7 attacks by Hamas and Israel’s response in Gaza.
‘An act of Jew hatred’
Mr Netanyahu’s allies in the Israeli cabinet responded immediately on Monday, describing the call for his arrest as “blatant moral bankruptcy” and an act of “Jew hatred”.
Referring to Mr Nethanyahu and Mr Gallant, Mr Khan said that he believed “crimes against humanity charged were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to state policy”.
He said that his team had assessed that the alleged crimes “continue to this day”.
The two men are accused of using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war, causing “great suffering”, “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population”, “extermination and/or murder” and “other inhumane acts”.
On Hamas’s attack, he said that the group had committed “a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Israel”, including through “rape and other acts of sexual violence” and taking hostages.
The application for an arrest warrant was issued after advice from a panel of ICC experts, which included Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer, and Baroness Helena Kennedy, a member of the House of Lords. Five of the experts on the panel are British.
‘Justice will prevail’
In a statement, Ms Clooney said there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant “have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and extermination”.
She said she hoped that “justice will prevail in a region that has already suffered too much”.
A decision on whether to issue an arrest warrant will now be taken by ICC judges. Decisions historically take some months and rarely result in an arrest.
Israel is not a member of the ICC and has called for allies to leave the court’s jurisdiction over the decision.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Finance Minister, described the call for arrests as a “show of hypocrisy and Jew-hatred” that recalled Nazi propaganda.
“Arrest warrants against them are arrest warrants against us all,” he said.
Benny Gantz, an Israeli war cabinet minister, said the move was a “crime of historic proportion”.
“Drawing parallels between the leaders of a democratic country determined to defend itself from despicable terror to leaders of a blood-thirsty terror organisation is a deep distortion of justice and blatant moral bankruptcy,” he said.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official, said that the call for the arrest of three of the group’s leaders “equates the victim with the executioner”.