The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Gaza Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, a move that Israeli officials say could derail efforts to bring down end to the conflict in the enclave.
An ICC court will have to decide whether to issue an arrest warrant against them.
The court’s prosecutor said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that” Mr. Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant “bear criminal responsibility” for a series of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed since at least October 8, the day after Hamas’s attack on Israel.
Among the alleged crimes listed by the court against Israeli leaders are willful killing of civilians, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and persecution as a crime against humanity. According to Palestinian authorities, more than 35,000 people have died in Gaza since fighting began last year, most of them civilians.
This figure does not specify how many of them were combatants.
The Biden administration opposed ICC action against Israeli leaders, saying the court lacked jurisdiction to rule on the case. A number of US lawmakers have warned that if the court goes after Israeli officials, they would seek to sanction senior court officials.
The Israeli prime minister’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The country’s foreign ministry declined to comment.
Mr. Netanyahu has previously declared that “Israel will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right to self-defense.”
“The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous,” he said last month.
In a statement on Monday, Karim AA Khan, the ICC prosecutor, also indicated that he had reasonable grounds to believe that Hamas leaders Mr. Sinwar, as well as Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri and Ismail Haniyeh, bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the territory of Israel and the Gaza Strip since at least October 7, the day of the attacks on southern Israel that left 1,200 dead . These crimes include extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape and sexual violence, the prosecutor said.
Hamas did not respond to a request for comment.
Based in The Hague, the ICC is an independent tribunal created by treaty in 2002 to hold military and civilian leaders accountable for violations of humanitarian law when a country’s legal system cannot or will not do so. It is separate from the International Court of Justice, the United Nations body responsible for examining disputes between nations.
