Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the decision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to declare itself competent to judge events in the Occupied Palestinian Territories was “outright anti-Semitism”.
The authority explained Friday evening having “decided by a majority that the territorial jurisdiction of the Court for the situation in Palestine (which has been a member since 2015, Editor’s note) extended to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967”.
“When the ICC investigates Israel for bogus war crimes, it is outright anti-Semitism,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
Fatou Bensouda, prosecutor at the international tribunal created in 2002 and based in The Hague, is due to leave her post in June and wants the ICC to take over from a five-year preliminary investigation following the 2014 war in the Gaza Strip.
This Palestinian enclave of two million inhabitants has been the scene of three armed conflicts (2008, 2012, 2014) since its takeover in 2007 by the Islamists of Hamas.
The ICC “claims that when Israel, a democratic state, defends itself against terrorists who murder our children and send rockets at our cities, we are committing a war crime,” Netanyahu noted, alluding to the 2014 conflict. in which several thousand rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel.
This war left 2,251 dead on the Palestinian side – mostly civilians – and 74 on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers.
“The ICC refuses to investigate brutal dictatorships like Iran and Syria which commit horrific atrocities almost daily,” Netanyahu criticized.
He had already reacted Friday shortly after the announcement of the ICC, calling it a “political body” harming “the right of democracies to defend themselves against terrorism.”