Slovenia to respect ICC arrest warrants for Israel: Premier

By Talha Ozturk

BELGRADE, Serbia (AA) - Slovenia will respect arrest warrants for Israel issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), said its Prime Minister Robert Golob on Thursday night.

According to a government statement, Golob said Slovenia "will fully comply" with the ICC decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

The ICC announced in a landmark move Thursday that it had issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts."​​​​​​​

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its deadly war on Gaza, which it launched last October.

In June, Slovenia's National Assembly officially recognized Palestine as an independent state making the country the latest European Union country to do so.

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 injuring over 104,000.

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.​​​​​​​