Amal Clooney, wife of actor George Clooney, advised the ICC panel supporting arrest warrants for Israeli officials and Hamas leaders, alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, pending ICC judge assessment.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) gathered a panel of international law experts, including British barrister Amal Clooney, who supported the pursuit of arrest warrants for war crimes against senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Hamas commanders.
Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are being investigated for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, according to an announcement made on Monday by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan. It is alleged that attacks on charity workers have made the humanitarian crisis worse and that Israeli officials have been deliberately depriving people of basic supplies.
In the meantime, Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif, and Yahya Sinwar are being investigated for their involvement in the October 7 attacks on southern Israel, which involved crimes such as sexual assault, torture, and murder.
Khan claimed in a statement that each action “demands accountability.”
The court takes a big step forward in that it is targeting a leader of one of the United States’s closest allies for the first time with these warrant petitions, which are still pending assessment and issuance by ICC judges.
Khan emphasized that the evidence gathered provides “reasonable grounds to believe” that Gallant and Netanyahu are accountable for crimes such as the purposeful targeting of civilian populations and starvation of civilians.
Clooney, the wife of actor George Clooney and an authority on human rights law, was among a group of UK-based attorneys who advised Khan. They unanimously approved the warrant applications, according to a report released on Monday.
The panelists described their involvement in “an extensive process of review and analysis” of the evidence—which included “witness statements, expert evidence, official communications, videos, and photographs”—submitted by ICC prosecutors to support the applications for arrest in an editorial that was published in the Financial Times.
Following this, the panel concluded that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that Israel’s minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, and Netanyahu have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity… [including] the war crime of intentionally using civilian starvation as a method of warfare and the murder and persecution of Palestinians as crimes against humanity.”
They added: “It is important to understand that the charges have nothing to do with the reasons for the conflict. The charges concern waging war in a manner that violates the long-established rules of international law that apply to armed groups and the armed forces in every state in the world… There is no doubt that the step taken today by the prosecutor is a milestone in the history of international criminal law. There is no conflict that should be excluded from the reach of the law; no child’s life is valued less than another’s. The law we apply is humanity’s law, not the law of any given side. It must protect all the victims of this conflict, and all civilians in conflicts to come.”
If the warrants are granted, any of the 124 ICC member countries may arrest Netanyahu, Gallant, and the Hamas leaders.
Just today, GreatGameIndia reported that the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Karim Khan, disclosed that the ICC seeks arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas leader Sinwar for crimes against humanity.
