In what must look like a slender ray of hope for Gazans who have been at the receiving end of the relentless bombing and torture, and the Israeli hostages with the Hamas, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants this week for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas’ leader Mohammed Deif. The warrants for Israel’s leaders are for their alleged war crimes; the ICC stated that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Netanyahu and Gallant “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival”. It added that they bear criminal responsibility for war crimes including deploying “starvation a method of warfare” besides “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
Neither Israel nor its strongest ally, the United States, are member states of the ICC – Palestine has been recognised – but the warrants are significant. First, they are a historic in that Netanyahu-Gallant have been finally summoned for war crimes and, while they do not lead to immediate arrests or trials, they do limit Netanyahu’s ability to travel to ICC member states. Israel has obviously rejected the warrants terming them anti-Semitic and vowed to not retreat till it achieves the goals of this war. This is ominous given that nearly 44,000 Palestinians have been killed and tens of thousands displaced-and-starved in the past 13 months.
Second, the ICC action has pushed nations to pick a side in this horrific war and called attention to starvation as a weapon – which was sorely needed. The US, Germany, Austria, Argentina and other nations have condemned the warrants, despite the war crimes listed, but the European Union affirmed that the warrants should be respected and implemented as “binding” on the states. The contradiction between nations supporting a genocide while talking of human rights was never more stark. This becomes significant as the West Bank and Lebanon come under Israeli fire.
Third, the warrants place on record, for what it matters now and in the future, the crimes against hum.ty in all their viciousness and cruelty. Palestinian children have been shot in the head, entire settlements razed to the ground, Israeli soldiers mocked and had fun at the expense of hapless Palestinians, journalists and aid workers selectively attacked and killed — all these are now on record for the world to someday confront the sheer “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt pointed out about, ironically, about Adolf Hitler’s Nazism against the Jews.
