Fatou Bensouda
Outgoing chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda says no information has been received from Israel about its strike on a building in Gaza that housed two major media outlets.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held discussions with Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit and others before issuing its response.
The move reflects Washington’s assessment that the measures adopted by the previous administration were “inappropriate and ineffective,” says U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“We have raised the matter with the [Israeli] embassy and informed them that, as a host country, the Netherlands is very invested in the fact that the ICC must be able to carry out its work without interference,” said a Dutch foreign ministry spokesman.
Israeli security forces also questioned Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki’s aides for 90 minutes at the border crossing from Jordan, according to Palestinian sources.
There is “no moral or legal equivalence between Israel, a democratic state seeking to protect the lives of its civilian population, and Palestinian terrorist groups committed to indiscriminate atrocities and the destruction of the Jewish state,” said B’nai B’rith International.
“The decision has no basis in law or precedent; rather, the ICC has become just another anti-Israel international organization,” Professor Eugene Kontorovich, director of International Law at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum, told JNS.
One of his first tasks in his nine-year term will be to decide whether or not to investigate Israel for alleged war crimes.
“I emphasized to the Secretary of State that the tribunal’s decision is fundamentally wrong, discriminatory, and that it jeopardizes the rare opportunity to promote peace in our region,” Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi said to U.S. Secretary of Antony Blinken.
NGO Monitor’s legal adviser calls the ruling a “legal travesty”; Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations rejects the court’s claim of jurisdiction.
Foundation for Defense of Democracies senior fellow Orde Kittrie said that while the ICC investigation of whether war crimes have been committed by the United States in Afghanistan “is illegitimate and inappropriate,” sanctions “are not likely to weaken the ICC’s resolve.”
The ICC can claim jurisdiction when countries fail to exercise legal proceedings, including where they purport to act, but are unwilling or unable to do so. That should not include Israel.
