{{BEIRUT}} —{ Israel is pulling out all the stops to prevent an examination by the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague in the Netherlands into alleged war crimes committed during its offensive on Gaza last summer that left over 2,300 dead and over 500,000 people homeless.}
In an interview with Israel Radio last month, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said, “We will demand of our friends in Canada, in Australia and in Germany simply to stop funding it [the court].”
Since Jan. 16, when Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, opened a preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine, Israel has forced the resignation of the head of the United Nations inquiry into Operation Protective Edge and called on members of the tribunal to cut funding to the court.
“So long as any institution for the prosecution of war crimes exists, the Israeli state knows that under any system of justice it’s their leaders and officials that are going to be facing prosecution for their ongoing and systematic war crimes against the Palestinian people,” said Charlotte Kates, the coordinator for the National Lawyers Guild International Committee.
“So, of course they want to see the ICC defunded,” she told MintPress.
Human Rights Watch investigated three attacks on schools in Gaza that occurred during Operation Protective Edge. The report concluded that two of the three “did not appear to target a military objective or were otherwise unlawfully indiscriminate,” while the third was “unlawfully disproportionate if not otherwise unlawfully indiscriminate.”
“Unlawful attacks carried out willfully – that is, deliberately or recklessly – are war crimes,” the HRW report asserted.
Likewise, an Amnesty International investigation into Israel’s destruction of buildings in Gaza determined that these attacks “are examples of what appears to have been deliberate destruction and targeting of civilian buildings and property on a large scale, carried out without military necessity.”
Kates told MintPress that even though the system by which the court prosecutes entities is flawed, the very fact that such a body exists that calls for the international prosecution of war crimes is always going to be something that the Israeli state looks at with “fear, anger, and hatred.”
Kates explained that both the United States and Israel want to remain outside the jurisdiction of the international legal body.
“Unfortunately, what that’s meant is that rather than being a court that actually been used to bring to justice the biggest war criminals and violators of human rights… it’s been used almost exclusively against African leaders,” Kates said. “So what we see is that even the International Criminal Court is used to perpetuate colonial injustice.”
{{Source: mintpressnews}}
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