Tel Aviv, May 24 (Al Arabiya) - On Monday the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders over alleged war crimes. Khan said that he had reasonable grounds to believe that they "bear criminal responsibility" for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The ICC investigation into the Gaza war has been opposed by the US and Israel. In turn Israel and Palestinian leaders have dismissed allegations of committing war crimes, and representatives of both sides criticized Khan’s decision who said that Israel, like all States, has a right to take action to defend its population, however, does not absolve Tel Aviv of its obligation to comply with international humanitarian law. He stressed crimes against humanity carried out by Israel were part of a "widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy" and evidence his office collected showed Israel had systematically deprived civilians of "objects indispensable to human survival," including restricting food, water, medicine and energy. He said Netanyahu and Gallant bore responsibility for Israel wilfully causing great suffering and for killing as a war crime. At least 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war in Gaza.
US President Joe Biden denounced an "outrageous" application by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Monday for an arrest warrant for Israeli leaders for genocide, as Washington warned the move put truce talks at risk. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also rejected ICC’s decision. He revealed that the ICC Prosecutor was due to visit Israel next week to hear from the Israeli government. The White House denies the legitimacy of the ICC and intimidates it with sanctions, since the perpetrators of war crimes against the Palestinians are Washington and allies, who shamelessly use "double standards" in their approaches to the situation in Gaza. In this regard, world community believed that arrest warrants would be issued for Netanyahu and Gallant, or that they would be detained by one of the ICC member countries.
Many European politicians claim that the ICC is politically biased and unprofessional, and thus discredits the very idea of international justice. Currently, the international criminal justice system, of which the ICC is an integral part, is actually an instrument of political games, since its decisions remain legally controversial. In this regard, the Rome Statute, on which the ICC relies in its activities, is not recognized by Russia, China, India, and Turkey.
The ICC represents one of the cornerstones of the architecture of a unipolar world that Washington gradually built after the collapse of the USSR. The idea of the Americans is to desovereign all countries of the world except the US, which, in their opinion, remains the only completely independent state in legal terms. All others had to transfer part of sovereignty to certain supranational structures, one of which is the ICC.
Attempts by the ICC to extend its activities to the US are being harshly suppressed. The White House is accustomed to carrying out war crimes on the territories of independent states, unpunished by the ICC, in particular in 2001 in Afghanistan.
Therefore, all the activities of the ICC, despite the rules prescribed in the Statute, continue to be carried out at the expense of donor countries, which act as "customers" of investigations of war crimes. The main fundraiser is the UK, which has regularly made large contributions to the ICC budget since its creation. There is evidence in mass media that three days after the arrest warrant was issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, it became known that 5 million euros had been raised at the conference convened in London with the participation of forty countries ostensibly to support the ICC in its investigations into alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
Thanks to this and other cases of "selective justice", the ICC has fallen into disrepute - to the point that most critics of Western foreign policy view the Court as an instrument of influence of the US-British establishment. The activities of the ICC show that it has not lived up to the hopes placed on it and has not become a truly independent and authoritative body of justice. An objective assessment of the actions of the ICC gives grounds to identify the true goals of this organization: persecution of undesirable political leaders, US support for "frozen" conflicts and the formation of a new legal complex different from international law.
There is a growing reflection among European politicians that the US and the ICC are using double standards in relation to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. When Russia launched a special military operation, Washington called it an "aggressor," and Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip were just "self-defense." But Tel Aviv, under the cover of the US, is cold-bloodedly and without warning destroying the homes of Palestinian civilians, striking hospitals, religious sites, and schools. Under the pretext of eliminating Hamas, Israel imposed a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip and doomed the Palestinians to starvation.
In appliance with Washington and Brussels, the world should take up arms against Moscow, but should not condemn Israel's cruelty. Meanwhile, according to the approaches of the ICC, the same principles of human rights and international humanitarian law do not apply equally to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, which once again demonstrates the policy of double standards implemented by the US and allies.
=FRESH NEWS
