ICC Announces War Crimes Investigation Into Israel

The International Criminal Court (ICC) announced on March 3 that they are officially launching a war crimes investigation into Israel over the treatment of Palestinians.

ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement that the investigation would focus on June 2014 onward, a month before the beginning of Operation Protective Edge but a day after Hamas kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers.

“Our central concern must be for the victims of crimes, both Palestinian and Israeli, arising from the long cycle of violence and insecurity that has caused deep suffering and despair on all sides,” Bensouda said. “The Office is aware of the wider concern, respecting this Situation, for international peace and security. Through the creation of the ICC, States Parties recognised that atrocity crimes are ‘a threat to peace, security and wellbeing of the world,’ and resolved ‘to guarantee lasting respect for and the enforcement of international justice.’”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the decision as “anti-Semitic”; Israeli President Reuven Rivlin also said in a statement, “We will not accept claims against the exercise of our right and our obligation to defend our citizens. The State of Israel is a strong, Jewish and democratic state that knows how to defend itself and to investigate itself when necessary.”

Pro-Israel groups denounced the ICC.

“The only thing more predictable than today’s ICC announcement is the outcome of that investigation. The ICC has already shown its hand,” Christians United for Israel Founder and Chairman Pastor John Hagee said in a statement. “It conferred jurisdiction upon itself and is limiting its investigation to events that took place one day after three Israeli boys were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas terrorists. Like the Goldstone report and so many international examinations of events in the region, the ICC will undoubtedly seek to find fault with every Israeli act of defense and seek to forgive every Palestinian act of aggression.”

The Goldstone Report was a report released in 2009 by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) documenting alleged war crimes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas; it asserted that the IDF intentionally targeted civilians in the Gaza Strip, a finding that one of the report’s authors later rejected.

The European Leadership Network (ELNET) similarly said in a statement that the ICC decision “allows the Court to be used as a weapon in an ongoing political conflict and it diverts the Court’s attention from addressing real crimes of the nature and magnitude envisaged by the Rome Statute. ELNET calls on the ICC’s incoming prosecutor to re-examine the question of the ICC’s jurisdiction in this case, based on substantial legal arguments and accepted principles of international law brought forward by numerous state parties and respected legal authorities, and poignantly expressed in the thorough minority opinion in the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber’s Presiding Judge, Kovacs. We are confident that a deep, professional and non-politicized examination of the elements of jurisdiction, gravity, and complementarity as well as the general interest served by the investigation should inevitably lead to the conclusion that this investigation is misguided.”

Prior to Bensouda’s announcement, the U.S. State Department had issued a statement on February 5 saying that they were “seriously concerned” that the ICC had said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was within their jurisdiction.