Israel’s Gallant calls ICC prosecutor moves against him and Netanyahu ‘disgraceful’

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described on Tuesday a request by the International Criminal Court prosecutor for arrest warrants against him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “disgraceful” bid to interfere in the Gaza war.

Netanyahu has rejected the ICC move and found support in Washington, which condemned perceived equivalency in the prosecutor also seeking arrest warrants against leaders of the armed Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

“The attempt by Prosecutor Karim Khan to deny the State of Israel the right to self-defence and to free its hostages must be rejected out of hand,” Gallant said in a post on X, referring to dozens of people still in Gaza captivity from the cross-border attack by Hamas on Oct. 7 which triggered the conflict.

Khan has stressed that Israel does have the right to defend its population. “That right, however, does not absolve Israel or any state of its obligation to comply with international humanitarian law,” he said on Monday.

He said that regardless of any military goals Israel wants to achieve in Gaza, the prosecution believes its means to achieve them – “namely, intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering, and serious injury to body or health of the civilian population” – were criminal.

The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, argued that there was no comparing “actions taken by a democratic government here with the behaviour of a terrorist organisation that is fighting in a way that has created these conditions”.

“I don’t think that a day has gone by that I haven’t worked with either the prime minister or the defence minister or somebody in their immediate circle on how you get humanitarian assistance to starving people,” he added at a conference hosted by the Israel Democracy Institute think-tank.

(Writing by Dan Williams, additional reporting by Stephanie van den Berg in The Hague, editing by Andrew Cawthorne)