Italy and the United Kingdom accuse the decision to “equate” Israel with “terrorists”
May 21. () –
The French Foreign Ministry has shown its support for the independence and the “fight against impunity” of the International Criminal Court (ICC) after the Prosecutor’s Office demanded this Monday the issuance of arrest warrants against the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and several senior officials of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the wake of the October 7 attacks by the group and the subsequent offensive against the Gaza Strip.
“France supports the ICC, its independence and the fight against impunity in all situations. France is committed to the search for a lasting political solution in the region, the only one that will restore a horizon of peace and put an end to the suffering of Israelis and Palestinians alike,” reads the statement from the ministerial portfolio.
After this, he recalled that Paris condemned at the time the “anti-Semitic massacres” perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023 at the same time that it warned about the need to respect International Humanitarian Law and spoke about the “unacceptable nature” of the deaths of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the lack of humanitarian aid.
UNITED KINGDOM AND ITALY CRITICIZE THAT THE ICC EQUIPS ISRAEL WITH HAMAS
For his part, the Italian Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani, described the request of the ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, as “unacceptable” during an interview with the Quarta Repubblica television channel.
“It seems unacceptable to me that a democratically elected Government can be equated with a terrorist organization that organized an attack that not even the Nazis committed,” Tajani declared during his speech, reported by the Italian newspaper ‘Il Tempo’.
From London, the British deputy foreign minister, Andrew Mitchell, has called the comparison between Israel and Hamas “ridiculous”, and has shown a position similar to that of Washington, which does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC in this conflict.
“This smacks of an unworthy and ridiculous sense of moral equivalence between a proscribed murderous terrorist organization and the democratically elected government of Israel seeking to protect its citizens. We do not believe that the ICC prosecutor’s request for arrest warrants contributes to a ceasefire,” he added, according to the British newspaper ‘The Independent’.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, has stated that the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant arise from “reasonable grounds” to believe that they “have criminal responsibility” for war crimes and crimes against humanity “committed on the territory of the State of Palestine, in the Gaza Strip, at least since October 8.”
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