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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu termed the arrest warrant application currently under review in the International Criminal Court (ICC) is based on a “pack of lies” while speaking to US broadcaster CNN.
Speaking to the broadcaster’s anchor Jake Tapper, he called the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan a ‘rogue prosecutor’ while denying allegations that he is starving Palestinians in Gaza as a method of war.
Prosecutor Karim Khan has laid out the charges — seven against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, eight against Yahya Sinwar, Hamas leader in Gaza; Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s political leader; and Hamas military strategist Mohammed Deif.
ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said Monday that the Palestinian militant chiefs could be culpable of “extermination”, “rape and other acts of sexual violence” and “taking hostages as a war crime”, he accused the Israelis of “starvation”, “wilful killing”, and “extermination and/or murder”.
Netanyahu called it a “moral outrage of historic proportions”, fellow accused Defence Minister Yoav Gallant lashed it as “despicable.” For US President Joe Biden, it was “outrageous.”
Netanyahu told CNN that Khan is creating “false symmetries that are both dangerous and false”. Earlier this week, France also aired a similar view when its foreign minister Stephane Sejourne urged people not to draw an “equivalence” between the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s arrest warrant requests for Israeli and Hamas leaders.
“These simultaneous requests for arrest warrants should not create an equivalence between Hamas and Israel,” Sejourne told lawmakers in parliament.
Netanyahu has said that Israel has been allowing food and medical aid to enter Gaza. However, aid groups have said that Gaza is at the risk of famine. Netanyahu responded to that by saying that Israel has allowed 20,000 trucks of aid into Gaza, which would be a fraction of what would have entered the blockaded coastal enclave in the same period under normal circumstances.
The embattled Israeli Prime Minister, who is facing some opposition from inside Israel regarding the future of Gaza, said that he was not planning to ‘reset’ Gaza when asked if Israel was planning to occupy the Palestinian enclave.
“You mean resettling Gaza? Yeah. It was never in the cards, and I said so openly [and] some of my constituents are not happy about it, but that’s my position,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying.
He said ‘squeezing’ Hamas was necessary because without that they would not free the hostages. “Military action that we take against Hamas is in fact the way to get these hostages because without military pressure, basically, without, you know, squeezing them, Hamas is not going to give up anything,” he further added, while speaking to the US broadcaster.
Israel’s military reported ground combat and air strikes on 70 targets in Gaza in 24 hours, while its forces were also engaged in deadly clashes in the other major Palestinian territory, the occupied West Bank.
At least seven Palestinians were killed in the northern city of Jenin, the Ramallah-based health ministry said, as the army said it was “fighting armed men” in a “counterterrorism operation”.
The Gaza war started after Hamas’s October 7 attack which sparked an Israeli retaliation that has brought a spiralling civilian death toll and levelled vast swathes of Gaza.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Hamas also took 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in Gaza including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 35,647 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Fighting has been raging around the far southern city of Rafah, the last area to face a ground invasion — but fierce combat has also been reported again in the northern Jabalia area where Hamas forces have regrouped.
(with inputs from AFP)
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