US President Joe Biden has called an International Criminal Court war crimes arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister “outrageous”.
The ICC also issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu’s now sacked defence minister Yoav Gallant, and a Hamas commander, Mohammed Deif, who Israel says was killed in July.
Judges said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe the three men bore “criminal responsibility” for crimes during the war between Israel and Hamas.
Europe and the US were split in their response to the warrant, with several European countries saying they respect ICC decisions. The British government indicated that Netanyahu faces arrest if he travels to the UK.
Biden said in a statement that “whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”
Both Israel and Hamas reject the allegations made by the ICC.
In a statement on Thursday, Netanyahu said: “The antisemitic decision of the international court in The Hague is a modern Dreyfus trial, and it will end the same way.”
He was referring to a high-profile case of antisemitism in France just over a century ago.
“The court in The Hague accuses us of a deliberate policy of starvation,” the Israeli PM said.
“This when we have supplied Gaza with 700,000 tons of food to feed the people of Gaza. We issue millions of text messages, phone calls, leaflets to the citizens of Gaza to get them out of harm’s way – while the Hamas terrorists do everything in their power to keep them in harm’s way, including shooting them, using them as human shields.”
Netanyahu said Israel would “not recognise the validity” of the ICC’s decision.
Just this week, the UN warned that Palestinians were “facing diminishing conditions for survival” in parts of northern Gaza under siege by Israeli forces because virtually no aid had been delivered in 40 days.
Gallant said the ICC placed “the state of Israel and the murderous leaders of Hamas in the same row and thus legitimises the murder of babies, the rape of women and the abduction of the elderly from their beds”.
Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, told the BBC that while he was critical of Netanyahu’s handling of the conflict with Hamas, he did not agree with the ICC’s decision.
“Israel has not committed genocide or war crimes that deserve these charges against the prime minister and the minister of defence,” Olmert told Radio 4’s World Tonight programme.
Hamas made no mention of the Deif warrant but said the move against Netanyahu and Gallant constituted an “important historical precedent, and a correction to a long path of historical injustice against our people”.
Palestinians in Gaza expressed hope Israeli leaders would now be brought to justice.
Israel denies the allegation that its forces are committing genocide in Gaza, which is the subject of a separate case before the International Court of Justice.
The impact of the warrants announced by the ICC will depend on whether the court’s 124 member states – which do not include Israel or its ally, the US – decide to enforce them or not.
A spokesperson for the UK Prime Minister did not comment specifically on the case, but said that the UK would always “fulfil the obligations under the act and indeed our legal obligations”.
This refers to the International Criminal Court Act 2001, which states that if the court issues a warrant for arrest, a Secretary of State “shall transmit the request…to an appropriate judicial officer”. If the officer was satisfied the warrant was issued by the ICC, they “shall endorse the warrant for execution in the United Kingdom”.
Officials from the EU and across Europe have all made statements standing by the Court.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said “the decision of the court has to be respected and implemented”. The Dutch foreign minister said “we will act on the arrest warrants” and Italy said it would support the Court, which should “play a legal role and not a political role”.
The German chancellor’s spokesman said Berlin had “unique relations with a great responsibility for Israel” and further action would only be taken when a stay by Netanyahu and Gallant was “foreseeable”.
Two of Israel’s closest allies in the EU rejected the Court’s decision. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he would invite Netanyahu to visit and “guarantee him that if he comes, the ICC’s ruling will have no effect in Hungary”.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said the court had made “an unfortunate decision” in equating “the elected representatives of a democratic state with the leaders of an Islamist terrorist organisation”.
South Africa, which has brought a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice accusing it of genocide, welcomed the decision, and urged “all state parties to act in accordance with their obligations in the Rome Statute”.
South Africa failed to honour an ICC arrest warrant against the Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir when he visited the country in June 2015.
The ICC prosecutor’s case against Netanyahu, Gallant and Deif stems from 7 October 2023, when Hamas gunmen attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages.
Israel responded by launching a military campaign to eliminate Hamas, during which at least 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.
For Deif, an ICC pre-trial chamber found reasonable grounds to believe he was “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 form of sexual violence”.
It also said there were reasonable grounds to believe the crimes against humanity were “part of a widespread and systematic attack directed by Hamas and other armed groups against the civilian population of Israel”.
For Netanyahu and Gallant, who was replaced as defence minister earlier this month, the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that they “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.
It also found reasonable grounds to believe that “each bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population”.
