The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for key figures in the war between Hamas and Israel, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
The court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, shared the court’s intentions with CNN in an interview on Monday.
Khan said that Netanyahu and Sinwar could face charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity over the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza that soon followed.
ICC is reportedly also seeking warrants for Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and two other top Hamas leaders, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, the leader of the Al Qassem Brigades, and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ political leader.
The news from Khan is monumental as it marks the first time the ICC has targeted the top leader of one of the United States’s closest allies.
Netanyahu is now in the same company as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, both of whom the ICC issued arrest warrants.
Now that Khan’s office has applied for the arrest warrants, a panel of ICC judges will consider whether or not to issue them.
Among the charges being brought against Sinwar, Haniyeh and al-Masri are “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention,” Khan shared.
“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 CNN.
As for Netanyahu and Gallant, Khan is seeking charges of “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict.”
Khan shared that the decision to seek an arrest warrant for Netanyahu helped illustrate that “nobody is above the law.
He also added that Israel is “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.”
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