Foreign Policy: Biden Shouldn’t Block Israel’s Leaders to Trial
Former executive director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth said the US administration was wrong to accept the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin of war crimes in Ukraine and again by refusing to bring similar charges against Israeli leaders.
He wrote in an article in Foreign Policy magazine that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fears that the International Criminal Court will soon charge him with war crimes in the Gaza Strip, which is why he appealed to the administration of US President Joe Biden to help him in this.
Washington is reportedly trying to dissuade ICC prosecutor Karim Khan from bringing charges, but its legal and practical arguments are weak, according to Roth, who is currently a visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Although Khan has not said what he is planning, he likely intends to charge Netanyahu with obstructing food and other humanitarian aid from the besieged enclave.
Khan has already warned the Israeli government that such obstruction could prompt the ICC to take action.
Given Israel’s refusal to allow ICC investigators access to Gaza, the obstruction, manifested in creating conditions for a widely recognized famine, provides greater evidence, among other things, of Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate shelling of Palestinian civilians.
Senior leaders of the Islamist group Hamas may also face charges of committing atrocities in the attack on Israel on October 7, the author believes.
Although Israel spares no effort in denying that it has obstructed the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the former director of Human Rights Watch, the international human rights organization, believes that Netanyahu’s denial of his starvation strategy is unbelievable, as there are extensive reports that Israeli officials have placed unnecessary obstacles to relief access to the Palestinian Strip.
Foreign Policy described the Netanyahu government’s threat of retaliation against the Palestinian Authority if the International Criminal Court indicts Israeli leaders as portending the PA’s collapse.
Roth said this threat is akin to shooting at itself, given the Palestinian Authority’s services to Israel by tightening control over West Bank residents living under occupation.
The article criticized the administration’s claim that the ICC does not have the jurisdiction to try nationals of non-ICC countries, even if they commit crimes on the territory of a member state.
He said Washington’s failure to recognize the court contradicted its accusation that the Russian president had committed war crimes in Ukraine, charges Biden deemed justified and unanimously approved by the US Senate.
Roth concluded in his article that Netanyahu is currently a major obstacle to a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, adding that he adopts extremist positions because he owes it to the two extremist ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, in the hope of staying in power and avoiding possible imprisonment on corruption charges in which he was involved before the outbreak of the current war.
