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Israel has launched a legal challenge to the attempt by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor to secure arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Karim Khan, the court’s prosecutor, applied for warrants earlier this year against the two officials, as well as three Hamas leaders, over alleged war crimes relating to the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
However, the Israeli foreign ministry said on Friday that Israel was challenging both the ICC’s jurisdiction and the legality of Khan’s request for warrants, arguing that he had failed to “provide Israel with the opportunity to exercise its right to investigate by itself the claims . . . before proceeding”.
“No other democracy with an independent and respected legal system like that which exists in Israel has been treated in this prejudicial manner by the prosecutor,” the foreign ministry said in a statement, adding that Israel remained committed to the rule of law.
If the ICC were to issue warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant, it would mark the first time that the court, which was set up in 2002, had issued a warrant for a western-backed leader, and would put the two men at risk of arrest if they visited any of the ICC’s 124 member countries.
Khan submitted his request for warrants against Netanyahu, Gallant and the Hamas leaders in May. It was a dramatic escalation of the legal proceedings stemming from the war in Gaza, which has also triggered a separate case at the International Court of Justice.
Khan said at the time that he was seeking warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for their alleged responsibility for using the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, and “extermination and/or murder . . . as a crime against humanity”.
Netanyahu rejected the application as “absurd and false . . . and a distortion of reality”.
Khan said he was seeking the warrants against the three Hamas leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh — for their alleged responsibility in crimes of extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape and other acts of sexual violence and torture committed by Hamas. Deif and Haniyeh have since been killed. Israel has claimed responsibility for killing Deif, but has not confirmed or denied killing Haniyeh.
In a court filing made public last week, Khan called on the ICC’s judges to issue the arrest warrants “with utmost urgency”. Khan listed various procedural delays to the case in the document, which was first submitted privately in August.
Khan also highlighted the fact that the judges had accepted about 70 submissions from other countries without explaining why those filings would help in “the proper determination of the case”.
Israel launched its offensive in Gaza in response to Hamas’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel, during which militants killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials, and took another 250 hostage. More than 100 hostages are still in Gaza, of whom Israeli intelligence believe more than a third to be dead.
However, Israel has come under mounting international pressure over the spiralling toll of its assault on Gaza, which has so far killed more than 41,000 people, according to Palestinian officials, and fuelled a humanitarian catastrophe in the enclave.
The ICC prosecutor’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.