The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, over alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The ICC accused Netanyahu and Gallant of a string of human rights abuses in the Gaza Strip, where local health officials said the death toll from the Israeli military’s yearlong assault on the Palestinian enclave had now passed 44,000.
Israel responded furiously to the warrants, with Netanyahu’s office branding the decision “antisemitic,” rejecting the charges as “absurd and false” and condemning the ICC as a “biased and discriminatory political body.”
Hamas welcomed the warrants as an “important step towards justice” but senior political official Basem Naim said the court’s decision “remains limited and symbolic if it is not supported by all means by all countries around the world to implement it.”
A spokesperson for the National Security Council said the U.S. “fundamentally rejects the Court’s decision […]
It will be fascinating to see how the US will resolve its internal contradiction. The US government is delighted that the ICC has indicted Putin, but believes that the indictment of Netanyahu is not valid. I suspect that the government will do what it generally does with these internal contradictions – it will ignore the discrepancy entirely, and go about business with the same moral smugness it has carried for decades.