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Israel announced yesterday that it had submitted documents to the International Criminal Court challenging the request by its prosecutor, Karim Khan, in May to issue an arrest warrant for its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Galant.
Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Oren Marmorstein said on the X platform that “Israel today filed its formal challenge to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and the legitimacy of the prosecutor’s requests to issue arrest warrants against the Israeli prime minister and defense minister.”
In May, Khan asked the court to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Galant on suspicion of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, as part of the war that Israel has been waging against Hamas for more than 11 months.
Marmorstein noted that in the face of this decision, “Israel presented two comprehensive legal opinions.”
Israeli officials, who asked not to be named, said the documents had been submitted to the court’s trial judges, who are tasked with deciding on the prosecutor’s request, a process that could take years.
The spokesman explained that in one of these two opinions, “Israel stresses that the International Criminal Court does not have legal jurisdiction in this matter.”
In the second, it details “the Prosecutor’s violations of the Court’s statutes and the principle of complementarity, as he did not give Israel the opportunity to exercise its right to investigate the allegations raised by the Prosecutor itself, before proceeding” with the request to issue the warrants.
