The influence of Art warrants announced by the ICC, external will depend on whether the court’s 124 member states – which do not include Israel and its ally the US – decide to enforce them or not.
But officials from the EU, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands and Italy made statements in court.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Barel, said “the court’s decision must be respected and respected,” while the Dutch foreign minister said “we will act in accordance with the arrest warrants.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s closest allies in the EU rejected the move by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said he was going to invite Netanyahu to visit, “and in this invitation I guarantee him that if he comes, the ruling of the Ministry of Internal Affairs will have no effect in Hungary and we will not monitor its content.”
The Czech prime minister said that the court made an “unfortunate decision” by equating “elected representatives of a democratic state with leaders of an Islamist terrorist organization.”
South Africa, which brought a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice accusing it of genocide, welcomed the decision and called on “all States Parties to act in accordance with their obligations under the Rome Statute”.
The Republic of South Africa did not execute the warrant for the arrest of the Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs during a visit to the country in June 2015.
The ICC prosecutor’s case against Netanyahu, Galant and Deif dates back to October 7, 2023, when Hamas militants attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 back to Gaza as hostages.
Israel responded by launching a military campaign to eliminate Hamas that has killed at least 44,000 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-ruled territory’s health ministry.
for the deaf, external The pre-trial chamber of the ICC found sufficient grounds to believe that he is “responsible for crimes against humanity such as murder; destruction; torture; rape and other forms of sexual violence; as well as war crimes such as murder, ill-treatment, torture; taking hostages; insults to personal dignity; violence and other forms of sexual violence.”
It also said there were reasonable grounds to believe that the crimes against humanity were “part of a widespread and systematic attack by Hamas and other armed groups against the Israeli civilian population.”
For Netanyahu and Galant,, external who was replaced as Secretary of Defense earlier this month, the chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that “each of them is criminally responsible for the following crimes as accomplices for the commission of acts in concert with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crime against humanity in the form of murders, persecution and other inhuman acts.”
He also found reasonable grounds to believe that “each is criminally responsible as a civilian superior for the war crime of an intentional attack on a civilian population.”
