ICC to probe Israel and Hamas for war crimes

Prosecutors for the International Criminal Court are to probe formally Israel and the militant group, Hamas, to establish if war crimes were committed during the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip, and in the years since across the occupied Palestinian Territories.

The decision has enraged Israel, which has not signed the 1998 Rome Statute that set up the ICC, and been welcomed by Palestinians, who have long sought to hold the Jewish state responsible for violations of international law over its 53-year-old occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

The bulk of the investigation is expected to focus on the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip and in Israel during the 51-day war in 2014. Hamas’s rocket fire into civilian areas in Israel will also be probed, as will its use of torture. The probe will also look at settlement building, the killing of protesters at the border and the blockade of Gaza by the Israeli military.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately branded the court anti-Semitic for opening the probe, which could potentially jeopardise the foreign travel of many senior Israeli military officials and politicians if the court eventually issues warrants for their questioning.

“The (decision) is absurd — it’s undiluted anti-Semitism and the height of hypocrisy,” he said in a statement. “This court, that was established to prevent the repetition of the Nazi horrific crimes committed against the Jewish people, is now turning its guns against the one and only state of the Jewish people.”

Wednesday’s announcement follows a decision in February by the court that held that Palestine, which is not a state, could delegate its jurisdiction over allegations of criminal Israeli misconduct to the ICC.

The Palestinian Authority, a semi-autonomous body set up in the Oslo Accords in 1993, is an observer state in the UN, and signed up to the Rome Statute in 2015, with the support of Arab states, but over the objections of Israel and the US.

“Israel is not above the law, and should not be above the law,” said Raji Sourani, a human rights lawyer in Gaza representing hundreds of victims in 189 cases submitted to the ICC. “Israel bombed Gaza, the most densely populated place on earth, for 51 days. There was no safe haven for us.”

Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by the US, the EU and Israel, formally welcomed the probe, saying it was a way to “investigate Israeli occupation war crimes”. But Hamas itself should be worried about the investigation, said Sourani. “Being a liberation movement does not mean license to do whatever you like,” he said. “If you are ashamed of something you have done, you should be worried.”

The investigation, which could take several years, is likely to face major practical hurdles. Investigators would need to travel to the Gaza Strip to substantiate the allegations made by Sourani’s Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and other groups, including Israeli rights advocates. Israel is unlikely to grant them access and it is unclear if Egypt will either.

Death tolls in the 2014 conflict have been disputed by both sides; Israel’s preliminary analysis accepts that it killed at least 760 civilians — including 369 children — in more than 6,000 air strikes, but it said that the figure, “while unfortunate, does not imply that (the Israeli military) actions violated the principle of proportionality”. Hamas killed at least six Israeli civilians and 67 Israeli soldiers, and holds the bodies of two for a possible prisoner exchange with Israel.