Netanyahu slams ICC arrest warrant ruling
PHOTO CAPTION: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem, September. 2, 2024. Ohad Zwigenberg/Pool via REUTERS
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced on Thursday the International Criminal Court's decision to issue arrest warrants for him and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, calling the ruling "anti-Semitic".
"Israel rejects with disgust the absurd and false actions leveled against it by ICC," his office said in a statement, adding that Netanyahu won't "give in to pressure" in the defence of Israel's citizens.
The Hague-based court said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians after Israel launched its attack on the coastal enclave following Hamas's Oct. 7 onslaught on southern Israel.
There was no immediate comment from Gallant, who was sacked as defence minister earlier this month after Netanyahu said he had lost trust in him over the management of the ongoing military operations in both Gaza and Lebanon.
But in a rare show of unity, bitter Netanyahu foes joined forces with government allies to lambast the court for seeking the duo's arrest, saying blame for the war, which has devastated swathes of Gaza and left tens of thousands dead, lay with militant group Hamas.
"The ICC arrest warrants are a mark of shame not of Israel’s leaders but of the ICC itself, and its members," former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett wrote on X.
Israel's main opposition leader Yair Lapid called the court move "a reward for terrorism".
Benny Gantz, who joined Netanyahu's war cabinet in the wake of the Hamas attack but quit in June, slammed what he called the "moral blindness" of the ICC, calling the ruling a "shameful stain of historic proportion that will never be forgotten".
Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who heads a small ultra-nationalist party in Netanyahu's coalition, said Israel should respond by annexing the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians want to build an independent state.
"The answer to the arrest warrants - applying sovereignty over all the territories of Judea and Samaria, settlement in all parts of the country and severing ties with the terrorist (Palestinian) authority," he said.
(Reporting by Jonathan Saul, Editing by Crispian Balmer and Toby Chopra)
