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The Biden fundraiser scheduled for mid-June is designed to have Clooney and Roberts engage grassroots donors over social media. They are also expected to lend their names for the Biden campaign emails and text messages.
The U.K.-based international panel of legal experts, of which one was Mrs. Amal Clooney, a noted human rights lawyer, gave their unanimous consent to Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor. Khan had announced months ago that he would investigate everyone involved in the October 7 Hamas attack inside Israel, as well as Israeli’s response inside Gaza. He is now seeking arrests warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders on war crimes charges.
“The attacks by Hamas in Israel on October 7 and the military response by Israeli forces in Gaza have tested the system of international law to its limits,” Clooney and other legal advisors wrote in an op-ed published in The Financial Times. The other members of the panel include: Lord Justice Fulford, Judge Theodor Meron CMG, Danny Friedman KC, Baroness Helena Kennedy LT KC, and Elizabeth Wilmshurst CMG KC.
“…The prosecutor has taken a historic step to ensure justice for the victims in Israel and Palestine by issuing applications for five arrest warrants alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity by senior Hamas and Israeli leaders,” the op-ed noted.
The panel unanimously agreed that the prosecutor’s evidence “provides reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant “have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
The panel also found grounds that Hamas’s most senior leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh — “have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity” for killing more than 1,200 people on October 7, for taking at least 245 hostages and for “acts of sexual violence committed against Israeli hostages.” Many of the hostages still remain held in Gaza.
More than 35,500 Palestinians have been killed and more than 79,000 have been wounded in Gaza since October 7, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Monday. At this time there is no way to independently verify those figures.
The warrants for Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh relate to the October 7 attacks and the subsequent treatment of the kidnapped hostages.
The charges against the Hamas leaders include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.”
Sinwar is the leader of Hamas in the Gaza, Deif is the head of Hamas' military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, and Haniyeh leads the Hamas Political Bureau.
Deif has been on the Israeli’s most wanted list since 1995 for killing Israeli soldiers and civilians.
Sinwar was sentenced to four life sentences by Israel. He served 22 years until his release among 1,026 Israeli prisoners in a 2011 prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held in captivity in Gaza for five years. Sinwar has been demanding that all of the prisoners currently held in Israeli jails be released in exchange for the still-held hostages.
Haniyeh was the leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip from 2006 - February 2017, when he was replaced by Yahya Sinwar. In 2017, Haniyeh was elected chairman of Hamas's Political Bureau and relocated to Qatar. Three of his sons were recently killed in Israeli airstrikes. Earlier this month, Haniyeh was in Turkey meeting with Turkish Presiden Erdogan, and it has been reported that he will remain in Turkey “indefinitely,” as reported by I24NEWS.
The evidence against Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh includes authenticated video footage and photographs from the attacks as well as evidence from eyewitnesses and survivors.
The next step in this process is for the warrant applications to be considered by a panel of ICC judges.
The decision puts Netanyahu in the company of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant over Moscow’s war on Ukraine, and historically with the late Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi, who faced an arrest warrant for alleged crimes against humanity at the time of his capture and killing in October 2011 during the Arab Rising, as well as the ICC arrest warrant against Sudan’s former leader Omar al Bashir, and Joseph Kony who leads the Lord's Resistance Army.
In their op-ed, the panelists wrote it is not unusual for the ICC prosecutor to invite external experts in international law and human rights to participate in a review of evidence. They wrote they represent diverse backgrounds, weighing in on a conflict that has “given rise to misunderstandings about the ICC’s role and jurisdiction, a particularly fractured discourse and, in some contexts, even antisemitism and Islamophobia.”
Netanyahu previously has said that any ICC arrest warrants against him and other senior Israeli government and military officials “would be an outrage of historic proportions.” He also said that Israel “has an independent legal system that rigorously investigates all violations of the law.”
Benny Gantz, a minister in Israel’s war cabinet and a critic of Netanyahu leading up to the October 7 attack, but joined forces with Netanyahu and Gallant in their response to the attack, has accused the ICC prosecutor Khan of “moral blindness” for drawing equivalence between the leaders of Israel and Hamas.
“The charges concern waging war in a manner that violates the long-established rules of international law that apply to armed groups and the armed forces in every state in the world,” the legal panelists wrote in their their op-ed. “The law we apply is humanity’s law, not the law of any given side.”
In response to the ICC's decision, President Biden called it "outrageous," and Secretary of State Tony Blinken called it “shameful” that the ICC’s prosecutor announced plans to issue warrants for Israeli leaders at the same time that the body seeks the arrest of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
