Charges brought by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defense minister, Yoav Gallant, are “beyond outrageous,” Netanyahu said Tuesday.
“I think these charges are, exactly as President Biden called them, outrageous; they’re beyond outrageous,” Netanyahu said on CNN. “This is a rogue prosecutor that has put false charges and created false symmetries that are both dangerous and false.”
The ICC’s “rogue” chief prosecutor Karim Khan delivered arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leaders on Monday, accusing the Israeli officials of “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict.” Netanyahu said equating the democratically-elected leaders of Israel with terrorist tyrants of Hamas is like “saying, ‘I’m issuing arrest warrants for [Franklin D. Roosevelt] and [Winston] Churchill, but also for Hitler.'”
President Joe Biden criticized Khan’s decision on Monday, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken added that the White House “fundamentally rejects” the legitimacy of the prosecutor’s investigation.
“Let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas,” Biden said in a statement. “We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”
Netanyahu also re-iterated the Israeli government’s commitment to delivering food and medicine into Gaza — over 500,000 tons already, he said — and blasted allegations claiming otherwise as “absurd.” Israel has steadily increased the amount of humanitarian aid it sends to Gaza since Hamas began the war in October but has cited terrorist hijacks of aid trucks and inefficient United Nations bodies as reasons why aid hasn’t been significantly distributed.
“This is completely false. It’s the kind of slander that has been leveled at the Jewish people for ages, and it’s renewed now against the Jewish state. It was false then it’s false now,” he said.
CNN’s Jake Tapper also asked Netanyahu if there was anything the Israeli government or the Israeli Defense Forces could do differently to mitigate civilian deaths in Gaza.
“First of all, every civilian casualty is a tragedy,” Netanyahu said. “Every child lost, or every woman lost, or every innocent person lost, is a tragedy. But for Hamas, it’s a strategy — so while we go out of our way to get them out of harm’s way, Hamas goes out of its way to keep them in harm’s way, shooting at them if they try to leave the battle zones.”