ICC warrants critical step in holding Israeli leaders accountable: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement

By Ahmet Gencturk

ATHENS (AA) – The International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a former defense minister mark a critical step in holding Israeli leaders accountable, an international movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions (BDS) against Israel said Thursday.

“All States parties to the Rome Statute, including deeply complicit ones such as Germany and the United Kingdom, are now compelled to meet their duty, fully cooperating with the ICC and executing these arrest warrants,” the BDS said in a statement.

“However, this alone will not halt Israel's ongoing massacres in Gaza or dismantle its 76-year regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid against Indigenous Palestinians,” it said.

Against this background, it called on the states to go further by fulfilling their obligation to impose targeted sanctions on Israel, including a wide-ranging military embargo, to halt its crimes and impunity.

“Israel's unchecked brutality and depravity, armed, funded and enabled by the US-led colonial West, have faced another unprecedented blow,” it concluded.

The warrants, announced Thursday, come as Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza recently entered its second year, having already killed some 44,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and injured over 103,000 others.

The Israeli onslaught has displaced almost the entire population of the territory amid an ongoing and deliberate blockade that has led to severe shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, pushing the population to the brink of starvation.