Legal Affairs
The Israeli president appealed to his French counterpart to stand by the Jewish state in the face of the court’s “morally and legally bankrupt” decision to launch a war-crimes investigation against the IDF.
In the first of a planned series of working meetings with European leaders, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin and his German counterpart, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, discuss Iran, the ICC, COVID-19 and more.
Responding to the International Criminal Court’s decision to investigate actions made by the Israel Defense Forces—calling them “war crimes”—Professor Boaz Ganor tells JNS that modern terrorists have adapted their activities to exploit the constraints of combat faced by liberal democratic states.
Prague’s move is “a blatant attack on the Palestinian people and their rights,” says the P.A. Foreign Ministry • “East Jerusalem is occupied land under international law,” claims the Arab League secretary-general.
The International Criminal Court’s ruling to investigate Israel for alleged war crimes in Gaza “was made in sin and will inevitably end in sin,” say the families of Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrach.
Nitzan Horowitz’s remark “justifying the political and anti-Semitic action of the court at The Hague and its persecution of IDF soldiers is a disgrace to the Israeli Knesset,” says Ayelet Shaked of Yamina.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris expressed “the administration’s complete opposition to the decision of the prosecutor in The Hague.”
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.
“We will continue to uphold our strong commitment to Israel and its security, including by opposing actions that seek to target Israel unfairly,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters.
“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.
Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) Cardin and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said they are “concerned that the court’s recent actions” have “inappropriately infused politics into the judicial process.”
The date set for beginning to hear witnesses in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial comes less than two weeks after the March 23 Knesset elections.
