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The ICC’s decision to charge Israel and Hamas leaders was made with help from Amal Clooney.
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Clooney joined of team of experts analyzing evidence of suspected crimes against humanity.
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Netanyahu and Biden condemned the ICC’s decision; neither country recognizes the court’s authority.
Human rights attorney Amal Clooney was part of the team that convinced the International Criminal Court to charge both Israeli and Hamas leaders with war crimes.
Clooney said the ICC’s prosecutor asked her over 4 months ago to join the team analyzing evidence of suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and Gaza, she wrote in a post on the website of Clooney Foundation for Justice, which she co-founded with her husband, actor George Clooney.
The findings from Amal Clooney and other experts led the ICC to announce on Monday that it was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, along with several others from both sides of the conflict.
“We unanimously conclude that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including hostage-taking, murder and crimes of sexual violence,” Clooney wrote on CFJ’s website.
“We unanimously conclude that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and extermination,” Clooney continued.
The team of experts, including Clooney, wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times on Monday, calling the ICC’s decision to seek arrest warrants “a milestone in the history of international criminal law.”
“As a human rights lawyer, I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s,” Clooney wrote on CFJ’s website. “I do not accept that any conflict should be beyond the reach of the law, nor that any perpetrator should be above the law. So I support the historic step that the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has taken to bring justice to victims of atrocities in Israel and Palestine.”
Though the ICC — a global criminal court based in The Hague, Netherlands — has the power to prosecute world leaders, it relies on member countries to enforce its rulings. Both the US and Israel do not recognize the ICC’s authority.
In a video statement, Netanyahu called the ICC’s decision to seek warrants against Israeli leaders a “moral outrage of historic proportions” that would “cast an everlasting mark of shame on the International Court.”
US President Joe Biden also weighed in, calling the ICC’s decision “outrageous,” adding that the US “will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”
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