Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Screenshot/GPO)
Israel filed two separate legal proceedings to ICC to drop the prosecutor’s request to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the Foreign Ministry announced on Friday.
The first petition challenges the legal authority of the ICC to file such arrest warrants. That court has no jurisdiction over Jerusalem but it claimed jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory, even though no such state exists under international law.
The second proceeding argues that chief prosecutor Karim Khan violated the court’s constitution and the principle of complementarity by not granting Israel the right to investigate itself. No other democracy with an independent and respected judicial system has received such discriminatory treatment.
Netanyahu on Tuesday slammed the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor for meeting with the president of Turkey and the head of the Palestinian Authority, whom he described sarcastically as “two great champions of human rights.”
“Rather than issuing arrest warrants for war crimes against Erdoğan and Abbas, Khan remains obsessed with casting as war criminals Israel’s democratically elected leaders, who are pursuing a just war with just means against genocidal terrorists. What a joke!” continued the premier.
The Israeli Prime Minister recalled that "Erdoğan is renowned for slaughtering Kurdish civilians and jailing journalists" and that "Abbas denies the Holocaust and pays terrorists who murder Jews”.
Earlier in the month, Karim Khan pressed ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber to file the arrest warrants, urging action ahead of Netanyahu’s scheduled address to the United Nations General Assembly on Sep. 27.
The Prime Minister devastated the prosecutor. "The comparison between Israelis and Hamas terrorists is pure antisemitism. Unfortunately, we have seen from the beginning that the proceedings in The Hague are politically biased and have no professional legal basis whatsoever,” said Netanyahu.
