ICC Prosecution Requests Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu

Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, announced May 20 his request to the Court to issue warrants for the arrest on charges of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and of three Hamas leaders: Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, and Yahya Sinwar. Among enumerated charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, were “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare”; “wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury”; “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime”; and “other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity.…”

The response of the Court to the request for arrest warrants is expected within a matter of weeks. Israel is not a member of the ICC which, contrary to the International Court of Justice, is an intergovernmental organization and is not affiliated to the UN. The grounds for and evidence of these charges are clear to the entire world. On May 19, UN Deputy Secretary General for Humanitarian Aid Martin Griffiths again stressed that without intervention in the Gaza Strip, there will be “apocalyptic consequences”. For months now, United Nations officials, among others, have denounced the horrendous conditions of famine and disease for the Palestinian population, which will continue to claim lives, even long after the direct killing stops.

Hopefully, the carefully-weighed decision of the ICC will shock the world into demanding action now to stop the genocide and organize a lasting and meaningful peace based on mutual economic development, such as the approach laid out in the Schiller Institute’s Oasis Plan.

That was one of the subjects brought up by EIR’s Mike Billington on May 15 in his interview of economist Jeffrey Sachs, who is very familiar with the situation in South-West Asia. Sachs noted that “we need a political solution and an economic approach, and the political solution is at hand, because all the world agrees to it, other than, two countries [the United States and Israel]. The political solution is that there should be a state of Palestine, and it should live alongside the State of Israel.”

There can be no question that the Arab countries in the region want peace and a normalization of relations with Israel, he added, but they can’t accept a Palestine living “under apartheid rule or worse, under a genocide, which is what’s happening in Gaza right now”.

“I couldn’t agree more that there’s ample opportunity for regional development. And there is a water crisis, and desalination is the way forward. And there are so many things that could be done…. But the truth of the matter is that Israel right now is absolutely radicalized, extremist compared to what it was even a quarter century ago, much less in the 1970s. It’s an extremist government…. I think we need to say, as a world community, stop the extremism. We need a political settlement… and we need an economic framework that can go along with that. And I think both are possible.”