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SvennoJ on 30 November 2024
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ICC prosecutor says no legal basis to suspend warrants for Israeli officials

Karim Khan said Israel’s appeal against arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant should be dismissed.

On Wednesday, Israel filed a challenge directly to the Appeals Chamber, as well as another appeal to the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber – which issued the two arrest warrants. Israel’s legal team has argued the ICC’s investigation and warrants are procedurally flawed, and it requested a suspension of the warrants during the appeal process.

But in a statement published on the ICC’s website on Friday, the court’s chief prosecutor Khan argued that Israel’s challenge to the Appeals Chamber does not meet the criteria for doing so under the Rome Statute and the proceedings should be discontinued.

Khan said an appeal could potentially be heard later in the process, arguing that “the Pre-Trial Chamber is the appropriate forum to address this issue”. He also argued that there are no grounds to suspend the warrants in the meantime.

The ICC issued arrest warrants on November 21 for Netanyahu and Gallant, as well as Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the October 7 attacks on Israel and the war on Gaza.

Cynical Western journalists do not see Palestinians as ‘fellow humans’: UN rapporteur

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, has taken aim at the “cynicism” of Western journalists for their “frustrating and, at times, traumatic” approach to covering Israel’s war against Gaza.

“After 14 months of genocide my conclusion is that many of my Western fellows do not see the Palestinians, as others in the Global South, as fellow humans,” Albanese said in a post on social media.

“Often out of deep-rooted/unacknowledged racism, they pontificate about [countries], history and people they neither know nor understand, without realising the HARM they do,” she said.

The UN expert’s comments followed after a terse interview with The Times Radio – a digital radio station operated by the Murdoch-owned News UK – where the interviewer attempted to correct Albanese for not referring to southern Lebanon as “northern Israel”.

The interaction grew more heated as the interviewer challenged Albanese’s use of the word “genocide” in relation to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, noting that the Israeli, US and UK governments strongly disagreed with that description.

Albanese pushed back saying, “It seems like I throw out the word ‘genocide’ as confetti,” before pointing to the South African case before the International Court of Justice and multiple statements from genocide scholars around the world to demonstrate there was evidence that supported her use of the term.