by Geoff Vasil
The recent request by an International Criminal Court prosecutor for a three-person panel of judges at the ICC in the Hague to issue arrest warrants for the prime minister and defense minister of Israel oversteps the court’s jurisdiction.
First, Israel isn’t a member-state to the ICC. Second, while the ICC recognizes Palestine as a state, Palestine doesn’t have the judicial abilities to act as a full-fledged state. Third, according to the ICC’s own rule or statutes, it must first petition the offending state aka defendant to investigate alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity itself.
Israel’s courts have already undertaken investigations into alleged war crimes by the Israeli Defense Forces against aid workers and civilians in the Gaza Strip.
Fourth, the ICC isn’t qualified to assess whether Israel is targeting Gazan Palestinians for extermination aka genocide by means of starvation and casualty attrition. In point of fact that’s the job for the UN’s International Court of Justice in the Hague. The UN has downgraded casualties reported by the Hamas suicide cult’s health department to about half of what the latter have been reporting, putting the ration of enemy combatants to civilian deaths to about 1:1, which is the lowest ratio in any war, let alone an urban house-to-house conflict, in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The claim by the ICC that the state of Israel is intentionally starving the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza in some sort of ethnic cleansing or genocide operation is simply false. Israel has been insuring the import of sufficient food supplies to the Gazan population, but the Hamas terrorist organization has continually seized humanitarian aid for itself, reselling it at enormous profit to the Gazans it has been using as human shields in the urban warfare situation.
The ICC prosecutor’s decision to push ahead with arrest warrants against democratically-elected Israeli politicians, while symbolically also seeking the arrest of 3 Hamas leaders, 2 of whom are believed to be located currently in non-ICC member-state Qatar, is clearly anti-Semitic, aimed at delegitimizing the state of Israel as the only Jewish state in the world and the only democracy in the Middle East.
Hamas stands ready to sacrifice every Palestinian in Gaza in order to score a propaganda victory against Israel. The civilized world knows what Hamas did on October 7, 2023, is a milestone in the abuse of human rights and basic human values. When human life is so devalued, it’s up to the people on the sidelines to stand up and at least note what is going on.
While Hamas’s “constitution” calls for the extermination of Jews around the world, Israel stands ever ready to make peace with its Arab population. As the victims of the Holocaust, Jews in Israel and around the world understand like no one else the price of genocide. The ICC has completely discredited itself, following this overture and the earlier judgment to arrest Russian president Vladimir Putin for war crimes for evacuating children from the Ukrainian military theater. Their next move will be to issue arrest warrants for the next US president for not providing illegal immigrants sufficient rights to buy homes and sufficient internet speeds.
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions official or otherwise of the Lithuanian Jewish Community.