Incoming Senate leader calls for sanctions against ICC over Israel investigations
Senator John Thune, the incoming Republican leader of the Senate, says his party will use its majority to pressure the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its prosecutor Karim Khan to stop pursuing an arrest warrant for Israeli officials.
“If the ICC and its prosecutor do not reverse their outrageous and unlawful actions to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli officials, the Senate should immediately pass sanctions legislation,” Thune said in a post on X.
“If [Democrat] Majority Leader Schumer does not act, the Senate Republican majority will stand with our key ally Israel and make this – and other supportive legislation – a top priority in the next Congress,” he added.
On May 20, Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu, as well as Israel’s now former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, alongside three Hamas leaders, all of whom have since been killed in Israeli attacks. The ICC has not yet made a decision on whether to grant the warrants.
Several senior Republicans have long pressed Khan not to investigate Israeli officials, even writing to his office to say they would bar him and his family from the United States if he went ahead with the announcement in May.
Families of American October 7 victims suing Iran
The lawsuit, filed yesterday in US district court in Washington, DC, accuses Iran of culpability for the Hamas-led attack on Israeli territory last year, which killed an estimated 1,139 people.
The lawsuit, first reported by The New York Times (NYT), details Iran’s funding of Hamas with the use of documents apparently seized in Gaza and published by the media.
The plaintiffs, according to the newspaper, also obtained a new document that exposes a meeting between Hamas’s senior leadership and Iranian officials in 2022, in which now-deceased Yahya Sinwar requested an additional $7m per month in support from Iran to fund something referred to as “the big project”. The suit and NYT say that this “project” was the October 7 attack.
Forty-six US citizens were killed on October 7, and 12 were among the 254 people taken captive by Hamas and other groups that day, according to the US government.
I hope they're not wasting time based on doctored 'evidence'. And Netanyahu should be implicated as well, from him it's well known he funded Hamas and made it possible for Hamas to keep being funded through Qatar.
The not-so-secret history of Netanyahu’s support for Hamas
https://www.972mag.com/netanyahu-hamas-october-7-adam-raz/
From sabotaging Oslo to funneling Qatari cash into Gaza, Bibi has spent his career bolstering Hamas to help perpetuate the conflict. Even after Oct. 7, argues historian Adam Raz, he's still advancing the same strategy.
When Israeli historian and human rights activist Adam Raz set out to write “The Road to October 7: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Production of the Endless Conflict and Israel’s Moral Degradation,” he knew he was tackling a blind spot in Israeli public discourse. The vast majority of Israelis, Raz believes, fail to grasp the full extent of Netanyahu’s involvement in bolstering Hamas before the current war, and in perpetuating an unending state of conflict.
Raz’s book, released in May of this year, sheds light on a controversial policy whereby Netanyahu’s governments for years routinely approved and encouraged the transfer of Qatari funds into Gaza to prop up Hamas. While noting that the Israeli media has devoted more attention to this policy in the aftermath of October 7, Raz told +972 that this is “just a sliver of the bigger picture,” which is rooted in Netanyahu’s broader opposition to a just resolution to the conflict. “People need to understand the full scope of Netanyahu’s strategy,” he said.
According to Raz, Netanyahu’s priority is not maintaining Israel’s security but preventing any real chance of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the division of land, ending the occupation, or a two-state solution. Keeping the cash flowing to Hamas served this objective by ensuring the Palestinian national movement remained splintered between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, thus allowing Israel to maintain its dominance over the whole of the land. Even after the devastating events of October 7, Raz warns that Netanyahu’s playbook remains unchanged.
But sure go sue Iran, just another distraction.
