Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the International Criminal Court on Monday after it issued highly controversial arrest warrants for top Israeli officials over the country’s war against the Hamas terrorist organization.
The ICC requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for what it claimed were war crimes in Gaza where Hamas terrorists have dramatically inflated the civilian death toll to such an extent that the United Nations recently cut its estimate of the number of casualties in half.
Israel has already ripped the ICC in the past, noting that their arrest warrants carry no legitimacy as Israel is not a signatory of the Rome Statute of the ICC and is consequently not bound by its rulings.
“The outrageous decision by the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, to seek arrest warrants against the democratically elected leaders of Israel is a moral outrage of historic proportions. It will cast an everlasting mark of shame on the international court,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. “Israel is waging a just war against Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that perpetrated the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Hamas massacred 1200 Jews, raped Jewish women, burned Jewish babies, took hundreds hostage.”
“Now, in the face of these horrors, Mr. Khan creates a twisted and false moral equivalence between the leaders of Israel and the henchmen of Hamas. This is like creating a moral equivalence after September 11th between President Bush and Osama Bin Laden, or during World War II between FDR and Hitler,” he continued.
Netanyahu called the “absurd charges” a “disgrace” and a “travesty of justice”, saying that it was nothing more than a ploy to stop the country from destroying Hamas.
“And I assure you of one thing: This attempt will utterly fail,” he said. “Eighty years ago, the Jewish people were totally defenseless against our enemies. Those days are over. Now the Jewish people have a state and we have an army to defend our state.”
He said that Israel will continue to execute its war “in full compliance with international law” which includes its unprecedented measures to prevent civilian casualties.
“Mr. Khan also sets a dangerous precedent that undermines every democracy’s right to defend itself against terror organizations and aggressors. The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel and Mr. Khan’s actions will not stop us from waging our just war against Hamas,” he said. “He’s doing something else. He is callously pouring gasoline on the fires of antisemitism that are raging across the world. Through this incendiary decision, Mr. Khan takes his place among the great antisemites in modern times. He now stands alongside those infamous German judges who donned their robes and upheld laws that denied the Jewish people their most basic rights and enabled the Nazis to perpetrate the worst crime in history.”
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