The International Criminal Court announced today that it has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes they are accused of committing in the Palestinian territories, including the Gaza Strip.
The pre-trial chamber of the Hague tribunal said it had “issued arrest warrants for two individuals, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the date on which the Prosecution filed the requests for the arrest warrants.”
In doing so, it also unanimously dismissed Israel’s challenges under Articles 18 and 19 of the Rome Statute, the statement said.
Regarding their alleged crimes, the court stated that it “found reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for the commission of the act jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhuman acts”.
The arrest warrants come as Israel’s genocidal offensive in the Gaza Strip recently entered its second year, having already killed some 44,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom are women and children, and injured more than 103,000 others.
Israeli attacks have internally displaced almost the entire population of the territory amid a sustained and deliberate blockade that has led to severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine, pushing the population to the brink of starvation, AA writes.
