By Michael Hernandez
WASHINGTON (AA) - The White House flatly rejected on Thursday the International Criminal Court's (ICC) decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for their conduct in the war in Gaza.
"The United States fundamentally rejects the Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials. We remain deeply concerned by the Prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision," a National Security Council spokesperson told Anadolu.
"The United States has been clear that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over this matter. In coordination with partners, including Israel, we are discussing next steps."
The Hague-based court announced the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant earlier in the day "for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024," when ICC prosecutor Karim Khan sought the warrants.
In doing so, it also unanimously rejected Israel's challenges to jurisdiction under articles 18 and 19 of the Rome Statute.
The court said it “found reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant "bear criminal responsibility" for "the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts."
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.
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.