International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan – who announced that he was seeking the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and various other members of the terrorist organization, a deeply flawed document that makes the inexcusable error of putting terrorist groups on the same moral plane as democratic nations – based his conclusions on a panel of experts who submitted a report on the evidence at hand, after which he concluded that there were reasonable grounds that the two sides committed war crimes.
But was the report worth any meaningful value to warrant such a decision? The panel claimed that "The premise that the investigation and arrest warrants were truly independent and impartial." But there is clearly anti-Israel bias of some panel members like Amal Clooney, with a clear record on the matter. It further says that the "panel did not advise on issues related to the admissibility of the case and international criminal law and, in the case of two of them, experience as former judges of international criminal tribunals... The Panel has operated pro bono and independently. It has unanimously reached all of the views contained in this Report. It will set out its key reasoning below, but notes that it cannot disclose any material that is currently confidential." This adds to the suspicion that there was a pre-determined outcome for the report.
The panel found the international armed conflict began at the latest on October 7, 2023, when "Israel first started responding to the Hamas attack on its territory by using force on the territory of Palestine without the latter's consent." This phrasing not only claims Israel was present in Gaza on Oct. 7 even though that is not true, but it also ignores the fact that Hamas ignited the hostilities by its own admission to catch Israel off guard, at 6.30 a.m. on Oct. 7. Israel did not respond for many weeks thereafter, and even then, only after Hamas continued firing rockets and holding hundreds of hostages.
The report also found that there were reasonable grounds that Netanyahu and Gallant intended the deaths of Palestinian civilians or were aware civilian deaths would occur as part of a "starvation campaign...either because the suspects meant these deaths to happen or because they were aware that deaths would occur in the ordinary course of events as a result of their methods of
warfare."
This is clearly false, both because Israel has been supplying Gaza with food and other humanitarian aid, and also because Hamas has been hoarding virtually all of it for its own purposes, thus preventing its distribution. The panel ignored the fact that Israel fully disengaged its civilian and military presence from Gaza in 2005, ending any occupation there. Hamas subsequently took over, creating its own de facto government. Israel's use of force in Gaza is within the right to self-defense against attacks by Hamas, a terrorist organization, is recognized under UN Charter Article 51, but the panel ignored that. This does not constitute an international armed conflict based solely on the territory being Palestinian-controlled, especially since there is no entity called Palestine in the Gaza Strip, and even supporters of Hamas won't recognize it as the sovereign power there.
