The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, has asked it to reject Israel’s objections to the court’s investigation of alleged war crimes in Gaza, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
Khan did this on Monday in a formal response to last month’s appeal by Israel on the grounds of what Jerusalem argued was the court’s lack of jurisdiction. The appeal came after the ICC issued arrest warrants last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for “crimes against humanity” in connection with the war in Gaza.
Netanyahu called the decision “a black day in the history of nations ” and vowed to fight the allegations.
In his response to the appeal, Khan argued that the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC’s mandate, gives it jurisdiction in any member state and that this applied to Gaza as part of the State of Palestine.
The State of Palestine is not universally recognized, and there is even less consensus on whether the Hamas-run Gaza Strip can be viewed as belonging to such a state.
Israel has maintained that the allegations against it are belied by the massive flow of aid into Gaza that it has facilitated, as well as by its efforts to avoid killing civilians—including at the cost of exposing its own troops to elevated risk.
However, its appeals to the ICC concerned alleged procedural flaws on the part of the ICC prosecutor’s office under Khan.
Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and not a member of the ICC and therefore cannot be tried by it, the appeal argued.
Another Israeli appeal concerns the issue of notification and alleged that the ICC failed to properly notify the Israelis it went after that it was preparing to prosecute them, relying on a 2021 notification instead of issuing a new one in connection with the war in Gaza.
The U.S. House of Representatives last week passed a bill instructing the president to impose sanctions on the ICC over its issue of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.
