It’s Not Netanyahu On Trial, But Karim Khan

The Israelis continue to express their outrage at International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s request that arrest warrants be issued for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who, in Khan’s view, are just as guilty of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” as Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Muhamad Deif. More on their justified fury can be found here: “Netanyahu: It’s the ICC prosecutor, not me, who should be concerned for his status,” Times of Israel, May 21, 2024:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in a Tuesday interview that International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan was turning the ICC into a “kangaroo court” by requesting arrest warrants for him and for Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, adding that it was Khan, not himself, who should be concerned about his international legitimacy going forward.

Speaking to ABC, Netanyahu dismissed the ICC’s accusation that Israel was deliberately denying Gazans food and water. “This is absurd, it is beyond outrageous,” Netanyahu said, calling the charges a “totally false accusation.”

“We are supplying now nearly half of the water of Gaza, we supplied only 7 percent before the war,” Netanyahu said. “We have supplied over half a million tons of food and medicine with 20,000 trucks.”

Netanyahu slammed Khan, accusing him of being “out to demonize Israel” and adding: “He’s doing a hit job. He’s creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains” of Palestinian terror group Hamas, who are also the targets of potential ICC arrest warrants. “That’s like saying after 9/11, well, I’m issuing arrest warrants for George Bush, but also for [Osama] bin Laden.”

“He’s also pouring gasoline on the fires of antisemitism that are spreading around the world. He is attacking the one and only Jewish state and trying to handcuff us,” Netanyahu said, adding that accusations like these would deny democracies the ability to defend themselves from terrorists hiding among civilian populations, even when states adhere to the laws of war.

Netanyahu accused Khan of undermining the global status of the ICC, saying that “he is creating false symmetry and false facts and doing a grave injustice to the international court.”…

Israel’s anger was echoed in Washington, which condemned the impression of equivalence given by the fact that the prosecutor, Karim Khan, simultaneously sought warrants against leaders of Israel and Hamas. US President Joe Biden on Monday condemned the ICC move as “outrageous.”

Khan said on Monday that Israel did have the right to defend its population but added: “That right, however, does not absolve Israel or any state of its obligation to comply with international humanitarian law.”

He said that whatever Israel’s military goals in Gaza, the prosecution believed its methods — “namely, intentionally causing death, starvation, great suffering, and serious injury to body or health of the civilian population” — were criminal.

So the fact that Israel has already sent 500,000 tons of food into Gaza amounts to deliberate “starvation”? And what does Khan have to say about the fact that Israel now supplies Gaza with half of its water? Does Israel “intentionally cause the death” of civilians, or does it do everything it can to avoid those deaths? The IDF has so far sent 15 million messages, 16 million prerecorded phone calls, 100,000 telephone calls, and dropped nine million leaflets, all in order to warn civilians away from sites, or buildings, about to be targeted. Any civilian deaths in Gaza are unintentional, if unavoidable in the conditions of urban warfare, and a result, too, of Hamas hiding its operatives and weapons in civilian buildings. And what does Karim Khan have to say about the eight field hospitals that Israel has set up to provide medical care to Gazans? Are these part of Israel’s malevolent plot to cause “great suffering and serious injury” to the Gazans, or an attempt, rather, to relieve their suffering?

US Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew said Tuesday there was no comparing “actions taken by a democratic government here with the behavior of a terrorist organization that is fighting in a way that has created these conditions.”

“I don’t think that a day has gone by that I haven’t worked with either the prime minister or the defense minister or somebody in their immediate circle on how you get humanitarian assistance to starving people,” he added, speaking at a conference….

So much for the charge that Netanyahu and Galant are deliberately “starving” the people in Gaza when they have been working, along with the American ambassador to Israel, to increase the amount of food brought into Gaza. Let’s remember that it is Egypt, not Israel, that has closed off the Rafah crossing so that no aid can go into Gaza from Egypt. Furthermore, soon after Israel started to make food shipments to Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, Hamas fired missiles at the site, killing four IDF soldiers, after which Israel shut down — though only temporarily — that crossing. That temporary closure was meant to send a signal to Hamas: don’t attack our soldiers who are merely trying to expedite aid to the Strip, or the crossing will again be closed.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 35,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though only some 24,000 fatalities have been identified at hospitals. The toll, which cannot be verified and does not differentiate between terrorists and civilians, includes some 15,000 terror operatives Israel says it has killed in battle.

Israel also says it killed some 1,000 terrorists inside Israel on October 7….

That means the IDF has killed 16,000 terrorists out of a total of 35,000 deaths, which works out to a civilian-to-combatant ration of 19:16, which is very close to 1:1, a ratio that no army in the history of warfare has ever managed to attain.

When the dust settles in Rafah, and Hamas has been taken apart, and Gazans themselves will tell the world how they have been so cruelly mistreated by Hamas, there will be time to hold up for horrified inspection Karim Khan’s crazed attempt to make us believe that there is a moral equivalence between the behavior of the democratic state of Israel, that has made unparalleled efforts to protect the lives and wellbeing of Gazans in nearly impossible conditions, and the behavior of the terrorists of Hamas, who have burned children to death, gang-raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered girls, sliced the breasts off women, cut off the genitalia of men and gouged out their eyes. Karim Khan has made the ICC a figure of fun. “That’s not what I meant at all,” Khan might say with Prufrock, but that’s how the world will take it.