Palestinian envoy to UK welcomes ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu, calls for full accountability

By Burak Bir

LONDON (AA) - Palestine's envoy to the UK on Thursday called for the “full force of law” to be equally applied to “Israeli war criminals” after the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced it had issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Ambassador Husam Zomot hailed the ICC arrest warrants, calling them a step towards accountability and justice in Palestine.

"Let the full force of law be equally applied to Israeli war criminals, and not only for the last 412 days but for the last 28,000 days," he wrote on X, referring to the Nakba (“Catastrophe”) of 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through their violent displacement and dispossession of their land, property, and belongings.

In a landmark move, the International Criminal Court on Thursday announced it had issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant over war crimes it accuses them of carrying out in Palestinian territories, including Gaza.

The warrants 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.