- Court issues arrest warrants for 8 Russian officials, including Putin, over the war in Ukraine, while no warrant is issued against Israeli officials
Israeli and American pressure to prevent the court from issuing arrest warrants for Palestinians Britain intends to present legal arguments that could derail the process.
Afrasianet - The International Criminal Court (ICC) is facing accusations of "double standards" because of its slow investigation of what the Palestinian people are subjected to under Israeli occupation compared to its speed in investigating Ukraine.
Since the entry into force of its founding agreement, the Rome Statute, in early July 2002, the court (based in The Hague, the
Netherlands) has been subjected to much criticism, culminating in Israel's ongoing war on the Gaza Strip since October 7.
With unequivocal American support, the war on Gaza has resulted in more than 150,000 Palestinian deaths and injuries, mostly children and women, and more than 10,000 missing amid massive destruction and famine that has killed dozens of children.
At the same time, the Israeli army escalated its attacks in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, killing 560 Palestinians, including 136 children, injuring about 5,300 and arresting about 9,510, according to official Palestinian sources.
Russia-Ukraine War
On 11 December 2020, then-ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda (2012-2021) completed her preliminary study of the situation in Ukraine, and then the court began an investigation into the Russian-Ukrainian war that has been ongoing since February 2022.
In March 2023, the court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova Belova on charges of responsibility for alleged crimes committed during the war.
In June of the following year, it issued arrest warrants for Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu (former
Russian Defence Minister) and Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
In total, between March 2023 and June, the court issued arrest warrants for 8 Russian officials in connection with the war in Western-backed Ukraine.
Russia is not a member of the ICC, nor is Ukraine but has given the court jurisdiction over alleged crimes on its territory.
While arrest warrants have been issued for high-level Russian officials, the court has not yet issued an arrest warrant for Israeli officials since it began investigating abuses in the Palestinian territories in March 2021.
On May 20, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Galant for their responsibility for "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" in Gaza. But this has not happened so far, although several countries, including Jordan, are demanding that these memoranda be issued and refrain from succumbing to Western pressure.
Israel continues its war on Gaza, ignoring the UN Security Council resolutions to stop it immediately and the orders of the International Court of Justice to end the invasion of Rafah (south), take measures to prevent genocide and improve the dire humanitarian situation in the Strip.
For the 18th year, Israel has besieged the Gaza Strip, and its war has forced some 2 million of its 2.3 million Palestinians into catastrophic conditions, with severe shortages of food, water and medicine.
Despite the ongoing war on Gaza, the budget and human resources allocated by Khan's office to investigate Palestine, according to critics, are far lower than those allocated by the ICC to the Ukraine case, adding to criticism of the court.
The ICC is an independent international body that is not affiliated with the United Nations or any other international institution, and its decisions are binding, but Israel and its US ally do not recognize the jurisdiction of the court, which admitted Palestine to membership in 2015.
Through public statements and behind-the-scenes actions, according to media reports, US President Joe Biden's administration is pressing the court to prevent it from issuing arrest warrants for any Israeli official.
U.S. senators have vowed negative repercussions for the court and its staff if an arrest warrant is issued for Netanyahu and/or any other Israeli official.
According to media reports, Israel also carries out espionage and intimidation activities against the court to halt its investigations into crimes committed in the occupied Palestinian territories.
In June, the Dutch Foreign Ministry summoned Israel's ambassador Modi Ephraim to provide explanations about reports that Israel's foreign intelligence service Mossad carried out secret surveillance and espionage operations targeting the international court.
The British newspaper "The Guardian" revealed last May that the former head of the "Mossad" Yossi Cohen threatened Bensouda with the security of her family, during secret meetings as part of pressure on her to abandon the investigation on Palestine.
Cohen and Bensouda had secret contacts in the years leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into Israeli war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.
On June 27, the court judges decided to allow Britain to present legal arguments in the case, while considering whether to approve arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Galant.
Britain's upcoming move before the court's preliminary examination chamber would delay the judges' decision on the fate of the prosecutor's requests.
Britain claims that Palestine has no right to join the ICC by accepting the Rome Statute, and therefore the court does not have the authority to investigate crimes committed against the Palestinian people.
Since 2012, Palestine has had "non-member observer state" status at the UN, and Washington's use of its veto power at the UN Security Council prevents the Palestinians from gaining full UN membership.
The Security Council adopted some 131 resolutions related to the Palestinian conflict with Israel, none of which were implemented.
UN organizations are being criticized for the distinction between dealing with the Palestinian issue and the war on Ukraine.
Russia's military operation against Ukraine has raised Palestinian questions about the duality of the position of the international community and UN bodies in differentiating between the position taken on the crisis in Kiev and Israel's actions against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The Palestinians' questions and anger were sparked by a video clip circulated of Irish MP Richard Boyd, in which he criticized the double standards used by the international community and United Nations bodies to impose sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin within five days, while no sanctions were imposed on Israel, which practices grave violations against Palestinians.
"The international community treats the Palestinians as an inferior race, and I noticed that world leaders used strong language when describing Vladimir Putin's actions, but those
leaders did not use the same language and were careful in describing the crimes against humanity committed by Israel against Palestinians and documented by the Human Rights Council," Boyd said. "Israel practiced brutal and inhumane persecution against the people of Gaza during its recent military fighting, during the systematic application of apartheid rules in the West Bank. He called this terrorism, and neither UN bodies nor world leaders imposed any sanctions on Israel."
"Within five days, the world imposed many sanctions on the Russian president, but after 70 years of oppression of the Palestinians, the leaders did not take the same measures against Israel, arguing that it was useless to impose sanctions on Tel Aviv."
Boyd was not the only one who criticized the double standards of international in dealing with the Palestinian issue, as UK MP Julie Elliott denounced the duality in the West's treatment of Palestine and Ukraine, saying, "The world is punishing Russia, but the Palestinians are asking why we are doing nothing to end the Israeli occupation of them, and it is necessary to recognize them as a state which is the minimum of their rights."
The irony of Irish MP Richard Boyd, in addition to the holding of successive sessions of the Security Council, the United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, and the announcement by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into
the situation in Ukraine, revealed the magnitude of the double standards of the international community in dealing with the suffering of Palestinians in light of Israel's continued practice of practices outside international law.
During the Israeli military operation against the Gaza Strip, the Security Council did not succeed after three meetings from passing a resolution demanding that Tel Aviv cease the aggression. During the only meeting of the UN General Assembly, no speaker described the army's killing of Gaza's children as terrorism or any other word of condemnation, while it took nearly two years to open an investigation at the International Criminal Court into Tel Aviv's violations against participants in the March of Return on the Gaza border. Russia's crimes against Ukraine.
So, "is Palestinian blood to the international community and UN bodies of the second order, and is humanity classified according to race and color?" ,
"International and UN organizations should take effective and swift stances on the Ukraine crisis, while refraining from taking a firm stance on Israel's more than seven decades of crimes against the population in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem alike, reflects double treatment and the absence of justice."
"The international community does not want to deal with the Palestinian issue humanely, not even in accordance with the rules of international law, so whoever does not apply
international law in Palestine has no right to talk about it elsewhere in the world," and that "the double standards on the Palestinian issue affect the credibility of the international system in general."
According to a Palestinian source, "the international community is always biased in favor of Israel and ignores humanitarian norms."
"It's not just double standards, it amounts to the complicity of the world system with Israel given the relationship of interests that bind them." "Despite the fact that weighty human rights institutions, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, the world refuses to impose sanctions on Israel, and there is a refusal to investigate these crimes by the United Nations despite the achievements made by the Palestinians in this file."
The source asserts that "the protection enjoyed by Israel, in addition to impunity due to international complicity with its regime, and the mere investigation of its crimes did not happen, and there is a widespread rejection by the United States of America and the European Union of any condemnation of it."
"Every day, Israel violates international law, committing crimes against humanity and war crimes, including the blockade it imposes on Gaza, military operations against the Strip, settlements in the West Bank and the apartheid regime
in Jerusalem, and the world has not acted, and this at the very least is described as complicity with Israel in committing crimes against humanity," he said.
Since the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the UN General Assembly has adopted some 310 resolutions addressing the dispute between the two sides, some of which condemn Israel and demand that it withdraw from the Palestinian territories, and the Security Council has adopted 131 resolutions that directly address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but none of them have been applied on the ground.