This is an expanded version of my column (£) in today’s Times of London.
The decision by the International Criminal Court prosecutor, the British lawyer Karim Khan KC, to request arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and its minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, is a wickedly perverse and deeply troubling move.
He has also requested arrest warrants for Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Mohammed Deif, commander-in-chief of Hamas’s military wing and Ismail Haniyeh, head of Hamas’s political bureau.
He has accused the Hamas leaders of murder, extermination, torture and rape which are crimes against humanity, and of taking Israelis hostage which are war crimes.
Khan presents this as a display of even-handedness. This itself is morally bankrupt. There can be no equivalence between a genocidal attempt at extermination and a country’s defence against it.
The accusations against the Hamas trio are based on factual evidence. Those against the Israelis are wholly without foundation.
Khan accuses them of starving Gaza’s civilians, wilfully killing them, intentionally attacking those queuing for food and obstructing delivery of humanitarian aid.
He says Israel has “intentionally and systematically” deprived Gaza’s civilians of objects indispensable to human survival”through “the imposition of a total siege over Gaza that involved completely closing the three border crossing points… for extended periods”.
But the very opposite is the case. There has been no “total siege”. Since the beginning of the war, according to Israeli statistics, 18,255 trucks have crossed from Israel into Gaza carrying 399,580 tons of food, 59,660 tons of shelter equipment and 23,110 tons of medical supplies.
It is Hamas that has been obstructing the delivery of aid and stealing civilian supplies for its own use and to sell on the black market at inflated prices, from which it is estimated to have made some $500 million — according to an analyst at the Washington Institute and supported by Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency. When Israel has opened fire around the aid trucks it has been against Hamas terrorists trying to steal their cargo.
Even more astoundingly, Khan makes no mention of Egypt which also has a border with Gaza. Yet Egypt has sealed that border and refuses to let any aid supplies through at all.
The claim that Israel’s defence forces have been wilfully killing Gaza’s civilians is also the opposite of the truth. It is, indeed, a blood libel.
The civilian death figures produced by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry and recycled by the UN have been grossly inflated. After experts pointed out they were statistically impossible, the health ministry slashed them — admitting that some had been taken from the media.
Karim Khan flanked by his trial lawyers
Two weeks ago, the UN quietly followed suit and halved its own totals. Since the Israelis estimate they have killed around 14,000 terrorists, they have killed approximately one civilian for every combatant. This is a vastly lower proportion of civilians killed than has ever been achieved by any other country in warfare.
The Israelis have taken more care not to kill civilians than any other country. Yet astoundingly, they are being accused of crimes against humanity.
The people who really have exposed Gaza’s civilians to danger are the Hamas terrorists, who have used them as human shields and cannon fodder by siting missiles and the infrastructure of warfare among apartment blocks, schools and hospitals. These are real war crimes against Gaza’s civilians which Khan doesn’t even mention.
Khan has relied for his evidence upon claims made by partisan “human rights” groups who oppose Israel’s existence and have been defaming it with lies that have inflamed protests and attacks upon Jews across the world.
He says the evidence against Israel has been supplied by “multiple witnesses interviewed by my office, including local and international medical doctors”. But many if not most of Gaza’s doctors have been exposed as Hamas operatives or sympathisers.
Khan has also driven a coach and horses through the fundamental precept of the ICC known as “complementarity”. This holds that court may only exercise jurisdiction where national legal systems fail to do so, and it must give a state itself time to investigate any claims that have been made against it.
Yet Khan has requested his arrest warrants without even asking Israel to investigate his charges. And since the war in Gaza is still under way, that is clearly not yet possible.
Khan himself was not previously known for anti-Israel views. A cautious individual, he is also an Ahmadi Muslim. Ahmadis are themselves victims of persecution and oppression within the Islamic world where other Muslims consider them to be heretics. He is no Hamas groupie.
Moreover, after the October 7 pogrom he came to Israel at the invitation of the Hostage and Missing Families Forum, toured the devastated Gaza periphery communities, met survivors and freed hostages and was clearly deeply moved.
He was also keenly aware of the ICC’s deeply damaged reputation as a court owing more to international power politics than to the rule of law, and which was all but wrecked by his two incompetent and deeply partisan predecessors in the post.
So why did such a man trash what was left of the court’s reputation by turning a court that is a supposed bulwark against tyranny into a weapon to punish a democracy for defending itself against genocide?
The answer is surely that Khan, a former member of a “human rights” barristers’ chambers in London, subscribes to “human rights” culture. And in recent years international “human rights” law — which, when it was developed in the middle of the last century to protect powerless minorities, some presciently warned would turn into a politicised weapon against the Jewish people — has indeed developed into a weapon to demonise, delegitimise and destroy the State of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. “Human rights” culture today is suffused with hatred of Israel and has thus played a major role in poisoning the progressive west against it.
Defensively, Khan says he has consulted a panel of “impartial” lawyers. Yet this panel contains a number of radical “human rights” lawyers who are no friends of Israel.
One of them, Danny Friedman KC, is a barrister at the radical Matrix Chambers. On November 18 last year he wrote:
Israel’s response to the attack on its territory has involved catastrophic mass fatality and untold human suffering of Palestinians — not only as a result of aerial and ground bombardment, but through, among other features, cessation of basic sustenance and amenities, destruction of medical facilities, and forced movement of populations within the blockaded geography of the Gaza strip. These are also grave war crimes… it is difficult to see from a legal point of view how the continuation of military action in Gaza at this time would be concordant with international law.
In a speech he gave to a fundraising dinner for Medical Aid for Palestine, he said a ceasefire was now “a matter of legal imperative”. These were hardly the views of someone who brought an open mind to the ICC’s deliberations.
Another panel member was the veteran barrister Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws KC. Her website says she is president of Medical Aid for Palestinians. Last October, she warned against “collective punishment” by Israel and referred to Gaza “being reduced to rubble”. She said only token amounts of aid were being allowed in and accused Israel of cutting off Gaza’s water supplies.
In a speech on genocide in the House of Lords in March, she said:
The current conflict between Hamas and Israel follows decades of terrible conduct, by both the IDF and Hamas, before, during and after 7 October.
Rub your eyes. In the view of this doyenne of “human rights,” Israeli soldiers who died in great number as they desperately tried to fight off the Hamas stormtroopers even while they were continuing to perpetrate that depraved and barbaric pogrom against Israeli women, children and men, were guilty of “terrible conduct”.
This “impartial” panel is actually a hanging jury from the Salem school of law: verdict first, evidence nowhere.
Khan’s attack against Israel — with the panel of lawyers he assembled serving as his human shield against criticism — represents yet another onslaught of defamation, demonisation and delegitimisation mounted by the apparatus of international law against the Jewish state, a unique and malicious double standard applied to no other country on earth.
Far from restoring the ICC’s reputation, Khan’s move will now bury it in the eyes of all fair-minded and decent people.
It will also hammer a nail into the coffin of human rights law, the legal instrument of the international “humanitarian” establishment of the UN and anti-Israel non-governmental organisations for which this kind of “lawfare” has become a principal weapon aimed at Israel’s destruction.
Doubtless under enormous pressure from both the UN and his former chums in Britain’s radical barrister sets, Khan’s preposterous move is part of the agenda for Israel’s destruction through a pincer movement of genocidal terror, brainwashed street insurrection and “human rights” lawfare.
The beneficiary will be Hamas; the victims will be Israel, the rule of law and civilisation itself.
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