The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, the court’s prosecutor Karim Khan told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview on Monday.
Khan said the ICC’s prosecution team is also seeking warrants for Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as two other top Hamas leaders — Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, the leader of the Al Qassem Brigades who is better known as Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader.
The move against the Israeli politicians mark the first time the ICC has targeted the top leader of a close ally of the United States. The decision puts Netanyahu in the company of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant over Moscow’s war on Ukraine, and the Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, who was facing an arrest warrant from the ICC for alleged crimes against humanity at the time of his capture and killing in October 2011.
By applying for the arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders in the same action, Khan’s office risks attracting criticism that it places a terror organization and an elected government on an equivalent footing.
A panel of ICC judges will now consider Khan’s application for the arrest warrants.
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, at left, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at right, are pictured. Getty Images/Shutterstock
Khan said the charges against Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.”
“The world was shocked on the 7th of October when people were ripped from their bedrooms, from their homes, from the different kibbutzim in Israel,” Khan told Amanpour, adding that “people have suffered enormously.”
Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people across several locations in southern Israel on October 7 and took some 250 hostages into Gaza. Many of the hostages are still being held in Gaza – Khan told Amanpour this meant crimes continued to be committed against “so many innocent Israelis … that are held hostage by Hamas and families that are waiting for their return.”
Khan told Amanpour his team has a “variety of evidence” to support the application for arrest warrants against Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri, including authenticated video footage and photographs from the attacks as well as evidence from eyewitnesses and survivors.
Khan said Israel had “every right and indeed an obligation to get hostages back, but you must do so by complying with the law.”
Responding to the announcement by Khan, Hamas said in a statement that it “strongly condemns the attempts of the ICC Prosecutor to equate victims with aggressors by issuing arrest warrants against a number of Palestinian resistance leaders without legal basis.”
“Hamas calls on the ICC Prosecutor to issue arrest warrants against all war criminals among the occupation leaders, officers, and soldiers who participated in crimes against the Palestinian people, and demands the cancellation of all arrest warrants issued against Palestinian resistance leaders,” the group added.
‘Nobody is above the law’
The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict,” Khan told Amanpour.
“The fact that Hamas fighters need water doesn’t justify denying water from all the civilian population of Gaza,” he added.
More than 35,500 Palestinians have been killed and more than 79,000 wounded in Gaza since October 7, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Monday. CNN cannot independently verify the figures.
Netanyahu called the decision “a political outrage.”
“They will not deter us and we will continue in the war until the hostages are released and Hamas is destroyed,” he said at a meeting of the parliamentary group of his Likud party.
Other Israeli officials echoed his sentiments. Benny Gantz, a member Israel’s war cabinet, criticized Khan’s decision immediately after it was announced, saying that Israel was fighting “with one of the strictest moral codes in history, while complying with international law and boasting a robust independent judiciary.”
“Drawing parallels between the leaders of a democratic country determined to defend itself from despicable terror to leaders of a blood-thirsty terror organisation is a deep distortion of justice and blatant moral bankruptcy,” he said, adding that the decision by the prosecutors “is in itself a crime of historic proportion to be remembered for generation.”
The leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, said the application for the arrest warrents was “a complete moral failure.”
“We cannot accept the outrageous comparison between Netanyahu and Sinwar … We will not remain silent,” he said.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog called it “beyond outrageous.”
When reports surfaced last month that the ICC chief prosecutor was considering this course of action, Netanyahu said that any ICC arrest warrants against senior Israeli government and military officials “would be an outrage of historic proportions,” and that Israel “has an independent legal system that rigorously investigates all violations of the law.”
Asked by Amanpour about the comments made by Netanyahu, Khan said: “Nobody is above the law.”
He said that if Israel disagrees with the ICC, “they are free, notwithstanding their objections to jurisdiction, to raise a challenge before the judges of the court and that’s what I advise them to do.”
Israel and the United States are not members of the ICC. However, the ICC claims to have jurisdiction over Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank after Palestinian leaders formally agreed to be bound by the court’s founding principles in 2015.
The ICC announcement on Monday is separate from the case that is currently being heard by the the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over an accusation from South Africa that Israel was committing genocide in its war against Hamas following the October 7 attacks.
While the ICJ considers cases that involve countries and nations, and the ICC is a criminal court, which brings cases against individuals for war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Monday’s announcement is not the first time that the ICC acted in relation to Israel. In March 2021, Khan’s office launched an investigation into possible crimes committed in the Palestinian territories since June 2014 in Gaza and the West Bank.
Located in The Hague, Netherlands, and created by a treaty called the Rome Statute first brought before the United Nations, the ICC operates independently. Most countries – 124 of them – are parties to the treaty, but there are notable exceptions, including Israel, the US and Russia.
That means that if the court grants Khan’s application and issues arrest warrants for the five men, any country that is a member would have to arrest them and extradite them to The Hague.
Under the rules of the court, all signatories of the Rome Statute have the obligation to cooperate fully with its decisions. This would make it extremely difficult for Netanyahu and Gallant to travel internationally, including to many countries that are among Israel’s closest allies – including Germany and the United Kingdom.
Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri have been officially designated as global terrorists by the US, meaning they are under travel bans, asset freezes and sanctions. The US, the UK, Japan, Canada as well as the European Union and others have designated Hamas as a terror group and imposed sanctions on its leaders.