Benjamin Netanyahu: Israeli PM rejects 'absurd' International Criminal Court arrest warrant

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denounced the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for him and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, calling the ruling “anti-Semitic”.

“Israel rejects with disgust the absurd and false actions levelled against it by ICC,” his office said in a statement, adding that Netanyahu won’t “give in to pressure” in the defence of Israel’s citizens.

The ICC has “lost all legitimacy” after issuing the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said.

“A dark moment for the International Criminal Court,” Saar said on X, adding that it had issued “absurd orders without authority”.

The Hague-based court said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in the Gaza Strip and the persecution of Palestinians after Israel launched its attack on the coastal enclave following Hamas’ October 7 onslaught on southern Israel.

The ICC also issued an arrest warrant for Hamas commander Ibrahim al-Masri, commonly known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip conflict.

The warrant for Deif lists charges of mass killings during the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel that triggered the Gaza war and also charges of rape and the taking of hostages.

Israel has said it killed Deif in an air strike in July but Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied this.

The prosecution indicated it would continue to gather information with respect to his reported death.

Hamas welcomed the warrants against Gallant and Netanyahu and urged the court to expand accountability to all Israeli leaders.

There was no immediate comment to the arrest warrant from Gallant, who was sacked as defence minister earlier this month after Netanyahu said he had lost trust in him over the management of the ongoing military operations in both the Gaza Strip and Lebanon.

But in a rare show of unity, bitter Netanyahu foes joined forces with government allies to lambast the court for seeking the duo’s arrest, saying blame for the war, which has devastated swathes of the Gaza Strip and left tens of thousands dead, lay with militant group Hamas.

“The ICC arrest warrants are a mark of shame not of Israel’s leaders but of the ICC itself, and its members,” former prime minister Naftali Bennett wrote on X.

Israel’s main opposition leader Yair Lapid called the court move “a reward for terrorism”.

Benny Gantz, who joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet after the Hamas attack but quit in June, slammed what he called the “moral blindness” of the ICC, calling the ruling a “shameful stain of historic proportion that will never be forgotten”.

Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who heads a small ultranationalist party in Netanyahu’s coalition, said Israel should respond by annexing the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians want to build an independent state.

“The answer to the arrest warrants - applying sovereignty over all the territories of Judea and Samaria, settlement in all parts of the country and severing ties with the terrorist (Palestinian) authority,” he said.

Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

The United States, Israel’s main diplomatic supporter, is also not a member of the ICC.

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan had announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Hamas-led attacks on Israel and the Israeli military response.

Israeli and Hamas leaders have dismissed allegations that they committed war crimes.

The court does not have its own police force to carry out arrests and relies on its 124 member states for that.

Whether they are arrested or not depends on the member states.

They have an obligation to do so but the court has only limited diplomatic means to force them if they do not want to.

Israel’s 13-month campaign in the Gaza Strip has killed about 44,000 Palestinians and displaced nearly all the enclave’s population while creating a humanitarian crisis, Gaza officials say.

It launched the campaign in response to the October 2023, Hamas-led attack which killed 1200 people in southern Israel, with more than 250 others taken hostage, Israel has said.