The Prime Minister has said on Tuesday that International Criminal Court’s (ICC) most senior prosecutor Karim Khan who is pursuing arrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and the Defence Minister Yoav Galant is “deeply unhelpful.”
The chief prosecutor said on Monday that after 7 October attacks in Israel he is seeking arrest warrants for the Hamas leaders, Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar.
The ICC have said they have evidence to charge the two Israeli leaders for war crimes against humanity.
Sunak said on Tuesday, “This is a deeply unhelpful development.
“Of course, it is still subject to a final decision, but it remains deeply unhelpful nonetheless.”
“There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self-defence and the terrorist group Hamas. It is wrong to conflate and equivocate between those two different entities.”
The US President Joe Biden called the application for arrest warrants for Nentanyahu and Galant with the ICC as “outrageous.”
Tory MP Michael Gove slammed the decision and accused Karim of trying “to hold Israel to standards that we don’t hold other countries to”.
“You cannot equate Israel with Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organisation, bent on slaughter. Israel is a state – like all states, an imperfect one, but one that’s trying to defend its people, and trying to equate the two is just nonsensical,” he told Times Radio.
Gove told the JW3 Jewish Community Centre in north-west London on Tuesday, “Of course, it is the case that Israel and the Israeli government have and will make mistakes and they need to be held accountable for those errors.
“But there is a difference between a state attempting to defend its own citizens against a terrorist attack and a terrorist organisation that has made it clear that it will act with the utmost ruthlessness and absolutely no discrimination in its effort to eliminate the Jewish people in Israel.
“So there can be no equivalence between them. And that moral position, I think, has to guide our response to the legal operation of the ICC.”
The ICC’s chief prosecutor said in a statement on Monday, “During my own visit to Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Kfar Aza, as well as to the site of Supernova Music Festival in Re’im, I saw the devastating scenes of these attacks and the profound impact of the unconscionable crimes charged in the applications filed today.
“Speaking with survivors, I heard how the love within a family, the deepest bonds between a parent and a child, were contorted to inflict unfathomable pain through calculated cruelty and extreme callousness.
“These acts demand accountability.”
Khan spoke about the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, he said, “the crimes against humanity charged were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.
“These crimes, in our assessment, continue to this day.”
He added, “The effects of the use of starvation as a method of warfare, together with other attacks and collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza are acute, visible and widely known, and have been confirmed by multiple witnesses interviewed by my Office, including local and international medical doctors.
“They include malnutrition, dehydration, profound suffering and an increasing number of deaths among the Palestinian population, including babies, other children, and women.”
