Israel on Friday appealed the arrest warrants issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court.
The warrants, which Israel and the United States, along with other countries, have rejected and dismissed, accuse the Israeli leaders of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes between Oct. 8, 2023, and May 20, 2024, in Gaza. One of the allegations concerns “starvation.”
Oren Marmorstein, a spokesperson for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, confirmed to NBC News that the appeal had been filed. He described the charges as “baseless accusations” and asserted Israel’s intent to “defend the justice of its positions” and oppose what it sees as a “miscarriage of justice.” Netanyahu has compared the warrants to the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew who was falsely accused of treason in France in 1894.
The appeals do not deal with the allegations, which Israel says 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. Instead, the appeals concern alleged procedural flaws on the part of the ICC prosecutor’s office under chief prosecutor Karim Khan.
One of the appeals, penned in November and submitted on Friday, focuses on the jurisdiction of the tribunal, which operates under the Rome Statute. Israel is not a party to the Statute and not a member of the ICC and therefore cannot be tried by it. The court is basing its jurisdiction on the fact that the Palestinian Authority, registered as The State of Palestine, joined it in 2015. But that entity is not universally recognized.
“The court’s legitimacy depends, in equal measure, both on the effective discharge of its mandate, and on adherence to its jurisdictional limitations,” the Israeli appeal says.
The second appeal concerns the issue of notification, and alleges 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.
