ICC arrest warrant

Gaza Deaths Could Eventually Be Five Times Higher than Current Toll

The authors said that while some have doubted the accuracy of the Gazan health ministry’s data, the scale of the war means bodies may be still be buried under rubble – and thus not counted – and indirect deaths from causes such as disease are likely to have occurred.

New Delhi: While Gaza’s health ministry estimated that around 37,000 people were killed as of last month in the Palestinian territory ever since the Israel-Hamas war broke out, the real death toll could eventually be as high as 186,000, an article in the Lancet medical journal has argued.

The article’s authors said that while some have doubted the accuracy of the health ministry’s data, the scale of the conflict means bodies may be still be buried under rubble – and thus not counted – and indirect deaths from causes such as disease are likely to have occurred.

“Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza health ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure,” authors Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf said, adding that as a result it has come to rely on information from the media or first responders to augment figures it collects from hospitals.

“Consequently, the Gaza health ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll,” they also said, noting that unidentified bodies accounted for 30% of the roughly 35,000 deaths as of May.

But despite attempts by some to “undermine the veracity of the data”, the authors said the ministry’s figures were “likely an underestimate”.

They attributed this to findings that the ministry has not named all identifiable victims in its list of casualties and that UN estimates indicated over 10,000 people were buried under the rubble in Gaza where, according to damage assessments, 35% of all buildings have been destroyed.

Additionally, indirect deaths caused by diseases – communicable or otherwise – spread during the war means the toll will increase in the years to come, they noted.

“The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population’s inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza strip,” Khatib, McKee and Yusuf wrote.

They arrived at their estimate of 186,000 dead by applying a “conservative” estimate that there were four indirect deaths for each direct death from the conflict – indirect deaths have numbered between three and 15 times the number of direct ones in recent conflicts, they said.

Their piece in The Lancet is a correspondence article, which according to the journal are letters from readers and are “not normally externally peer reviewed”.

Gaza’s health ministry most recent estimates say the Israel-Hamas war has killed over 38,200 people in the territory, AP reported.

The conflict began after Hamas, the Palestinian organisation that governs Gaza, launched a terrorist attack in Israel in October that killed about 1,200 people. Israel then launched an offensive into Gaza with the aim of destroying Hamas.

Its offensive, which is ongoing, has been criticised for killing many civilians, a majority of them women and children.

In May, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor applied for arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, as well as against three Hamas leaders, saying he believed they had committed war crimes during the conflict.

Ukraine War: ICC Issues Arrest Warrant For Russian Army General, Former Defence Minister

The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe that the two bore responsibility for Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian electrical infrastructure during the course of the war.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague said on Tuesday (June 25) it is seeking the arrest of former Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu and current military chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov.

The charges pertain to alleged crimes committed during Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Attacks on energy infrastructure at the heart of the warrants

The court said in a press release on Tuesday that there were “reasonable grounds to believe that the two suspects bear responsibility for missile strikes carried out by the Russian armed forces against the Ukrainian electric infrastructure from at least 10 October 2022 until at least 9 March 2023”.

The Russian officials are accused of responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity for directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects in Ukraine.

Until Shoigu’s relatively recent dismissal and reassignment to the country’s security council, the two men were arguably President Vladimir Putin’s most senior defence officials.

Andrey Belousov has since taken over as defence minister.

Russia dismisses charges as ‘void’ and part of ‘West’s hybrid war’

The Russian Security Council dismissed the arrest warrants as pointless in its initial response on Tuesday, describing them as “a shaking of the air”, an idiom for an action with no real impact.

“This is a shaking of the air, as the ICC’s jurisdiction does not extend to Russia, and was adopted as part of the West’s hybrid war against our country,” the press service of the Russian Security Council said, as relayed by the Interfax news agency.

It described the decision as “null and void”.

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov also said earlier this year, commenting on other ICC warrants against a pair of military officials, that Russia did not recognise ICC decisions, as Moscow was “not party to the statute”.

Who are Shoigu and Gerasmiov?

Shoigu, 69, served as defence minister for more than a decade under Putin, starting in 2012, prior to his unexpected dismissal in May.

He’s known to be close to Putin – the pair were famously pictured bare-chested, hiking and fishing together on holiday in Shoigu’s native Siberia.

His position was weakened by the arrest of one of his deputies this April amid a major corruption scandal.

Gerasimov, 68, was also appointed to his post in 2012. He’s the overall commander of the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

Gerasimov has stayed in his post but is also deemed vulnerable, with his deputy at the general staff among those detained and under investigation in the corruption probe.

In terms of Russia’s military structure, his post is outranked only by two politicians: Putin himself, who is commander-in-chief, and the defence minister.

Both of them faced considerable criticism from the deceased leader of the Wagner mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in the months before Prigozhin and Wagner’s brief “rebellion”, his subsequent departure for Belarus and death in a plane crash barely two months later.

Eight Russians now facing ICC charges over Ukraine

Putin himself also faces an ICC arrest warrant, connected to the alleged forced relocation of Ukrainian children to Russia and Russian families. That was issued in March 2023.

In total, the ICC has sought the arrest of eight Russian officials since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Russia is not a full signatory to the ICC and generally does not extradite its citizens. It’s not clear whether they will ever face trial, therefore. The tribunal has no police force of its own and relies on member states to make arrests on its behalf.

Ukraine is also not a member, but has granted the ICC authority to investigate and prosecute crimes committed on its territory from the 2014 annexation of Crimea onwards, explaining how the indictments are possible.

If nothing else, the warrants are liable to limit the travel options for the affected officials, assuming they do not want to risk arrest.

This article was originally published on DW.

Israeli Spy Chief Pressured ICC Prosecutor to Drop War Crimes Probe Against Israel: Report

The revelations were made in a report published by The Guardian as part of a joint investigation with two Israeli publications, which looks into how Israeli intelligence agencies “ran a covert “war” against the ICC for almost a decade”.

New Delhi: Israel’s former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen had reportedly threatened then-chief prosecutor of the Rome-based International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, during a series of meetings aimed at persuading her to abandon an investigation into alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The revelations were made in a report published by the UK newspaper The Guardian as part of a joint investigation with Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, which looks into how Israeli intelligence agencies “ran a covert “war” against the ICC for almost a decade”.

When contacted, there were no comments from either Cohen or Bensouda.

The spokesperson of the Israeli prime minister’s office termed the questions from The Guardian as “replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel”.

Last week, Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, announced that the ICC was seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Yoav Gallant and three senior Hamas leaders.

In 2015, Bensouda as ICC prosecutor opened a preliminary investigation to find out if the allegation of crimes by individuals in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem was tenable.

Israel, which does not recognise the ICC, had then feared that its citizens could be prosecuted for their involvement in operations in Palestine.

“Soon after commencing the preliminary examination, Bensouda and her senior prosecutors began to receive warnings that Israeli intelligence was taking a close interest in their work,” wrote The Guardian.

Cohen took over as Mossad director in January 2016 after having served three years as Israel’s national security advisor.

As per the newspaper, the first interaction took place at the 2017 Munich Security Conference, where Cohen introduced himself to Bensouda in a “brief exchange”.

A year later in 2018, the ICC prosecutor was meeting the then-President of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Joseph Kabila, in a Manhattan hotel.

The ICC was conducting a probe into war crimes and crimes against humanity in the armed conflict in the DRC.

“At a certain point, after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials travelling with her,” said the report.

The Israeli publication TheMarker and broadcaster Kan 11 had reported a few years ago that the Mossad chief had made a series of “secretive trips” to the DRC in 2019.

After the sudden meeting in New York, Cohen kept calling Bensouda to seek meetings, three sources told the joint investigation.

“According to two people familiar with the situation, at one stage Bensouda asked Cohen how he had obtained her phone number, to which he replied: “Did you forget what I do for a living?”

In those initial encounters, the Mossad chief attempted to charm Bensouda, but over time the tone changed, which “prompted Bensouda to inform a small group of senior ICC officials about his behaviour”.

In December 2019, the ICC prosecutor announced that she had grounds to open a full investigation into the alleged war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, but first requested a ruling from the ICC’s pre-trial chamber to confirm whether the court had jurisdiction over Palestine.

Over the next year and till early 2021, the article said that Cohen initiated at least three encounters with Bensouda.

In their last two meetings, Cohen directly raised questions about her security and her family “in a manner that led her to believe he was threatening her”.

Bensouda conveyed to her ICC colleagues that Cohen told her, “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

He also apparently showed copies of covert photographs of Bensouda with her husband taken in Loden.

Also read: What Israel’s Eroding Impunity Means for India

He suggested, as the sources told the media outlets, that opening the investigation would be detrimental to her career.

“Four sources familiar with the situation said it was around the same time that Bensouda and other ICC officials discovered that information was circulating among diplomatic channels relating to her husband, who worked as an international affairs consultant … The spy agency obtained a cache of material, including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against her husband.”

The investigative article said that the provenance of the recordings was not clear and there was a possibility that they were fabricated.

“Once in the possession of Israel, however, the material was used by its diplomats in an unsuccessful attempt to undermine the chief prosecutor. But according to multiple sources, Israel failed to convince its allies of the significance of the material,” said The Guardian.

Under the Donald Trump administration, the United States imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor.

While it was primarily to retaliate against the ICC’s opening an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, the then-US secretary of state Mike Pompeo had also linked it with the Palestine issue.

The US removed its sanctions on ICC officials after Joe Biden’s taking over the White House.

In February 2021, the ICC’s pre-trial chamber confirmed that the court had jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories.

The following month, Bensouda announced the initiation of a criminal investigation, which resulted in Khan seeking arrest warrants last week as a consequence of the renewed urgency due to the latest Gaza War.

The newspaper reported that legal experts and former ICC officials opined that efforts by the Israeli foreign intelligence agency to pressurise Bensouda could amount to offences against the administration of justice under article 70 of the Rome statute.

In a separate report, +972 Magazine published an article about Israel’s intelligence operation to intensely surveil senior ICC and UN officials, which allegedly dates back to 2015.

“According to sources, the covert operation mobilised the highest branches of Israel’s government, the intelligence community, and both the civilian and military legal systems in order to derail the probe,” the article says.

It continues: “The intelligence information obtained via surveillance was passed on to a secret team of top Israeli government lawyers and diplomats, who traveled to The Hague for confidential meetings with ICC officials in an attempt to “feed [the chief prosecutor] information that would make her doubt the basis of her right to be dealing with this question”.”

It also alleged that the intelligence was used by the Israeli military to retroactively open investigations into incidents of interest to the ICC, in an attempt to demonstrate that Israel’s legal system is capable of holding itself accountable.

The magazine reported that the Israeli PM had a direct role in the operations regarding the monitoring of ICC officials. “One source stressed that Netanyahu was “obsessed, obsessed, obsessed” with finding out what materials the ICC was receiving.”

When Khan announced the application of arrest warrants on May 20, he tellingly warned: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately. My office will not hesitate to act pursuant to article 70 of the Rome Statute if such conduct continues.”