Amal Clooney was among a group of U.K.-based international law experts who gave their unanimous approval to Karim Khan, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, to seek arrests warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders on war crimes charges.
“The attacks by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7 and the military response by Israeli forces in Gaza have tested the system of international law to its limits,” Clooney, a human rights attorney, and other legal advisors wrote in an op-ed published by the Financial Times. The panel of lawyers and former judges said they had been approached by Khan to advise on the warrant applications.
“Today, the prosecutor has taken a historic step to ensure justice for the victims in Israel and Palestine by issuing applications for five arrest warrants alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity by senior Hamas and Israeli leaders,” the op-ed continued.
The panel of legal experts said it unanimously agreed that the prosecutor’s evidence “provides reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant “have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity,” related to Israel’s war on Gaza, in response to Hamas’s attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Similarly, the panel said there are grounds to believe that Hamas’s most senior leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh — “have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity” for killing more than 1,200 people on Oct. 7, for taking at least 245 hostages and for “acts of sexual violence committed against Israeli hostages.” Many of the hostages are still being held in Gaza.
In an interview with CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, Khan said the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant include “causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, deliberately targeting civilians in conflict.”
More than 35,500 Palestinians have been killed and more than 79,000 wounded in Gaza since Oct. 7, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Monday, CNN reported, adding that it could not independently verify the figures.
The warrants for Sinwar, Al-Masri and Haniyeh relate to the Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent treatment of hostages kidnapped during the assault. Khan said the charges against the three include “extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape and sexual assault in detention.” Sinwar is the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Al-Masri is the head of the group’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, and Haniyeh leads the Hamas Political Bureau, the Daily Beast reported.
Khan told Amanpour his team had a “variety of evidence” to support the application for arrest warrants against Sinwar, al-Masri and Haniyeh, including authenticated video footage and photographs from the attacks as well as evidence from eyewitnesses and survivors.
“The world was shocked on the 7th of October when people were ripped from their bedrooms, from their homes, from the different kibbutzim in Israel,” Khan told Amanpour.
The warrant applications will now be considered by a panel of ICC judges, the Daily Beast reported. But in alleging war crimes against Netanyahu, the court is targeting the leader of one of the United States’ close allies for the first time, according to CNN. The decision puts Netanyahu in the company of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, for whom the ICC issued an arrest warrant over Moscow’s war on Ukraine, and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who faced an arrest warrant for alleged crimes against humanity at the time of his capture and killing in October 2011.
In their op-ed, Clooney and the other panelists said it is not unusual for the ICC prosecutor to invite external experts in international law and human rights to participate in a review of evidence. They said they represent diverse backgrounds, weighing in on a conflict that has “given rise to misunderstandings about the ICC’s role and jurisdiction, a particularly fractured discourse and, in some contexts, even antisemitism and Islamophobia.”
Clooney is the wife of actor George Clooney, as well as an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School and co-founder of the Clooney Foundation for Justice. Other panelists include a former judge at the International Criminal Court and a former president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Netanyahu called Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants for him and Gallant “a political outrage,” CNN reported. Netanyahu previously said that any ICC arrest warrants against him and other senior Israeli government and military officials “would be an outrage of historic proportions.” He also said that Israel “has an independent legal system that rigorously investigates all violations of the law.”
By applying for the arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders in the same action, Khan’s office risks attracting criticism that it places a terror organization and the elected government of a democratic nation on an equivalent footing, CNN also reported. Benny Gantz, a minister in Israel’s war cabinet and a critic of Netanyahu, agreed, accusing the ICC prosecutor of “moral blindness” for drawing equivalence between the leaders of Israel and Hamas, the New York Times reported.
When asked about such comments from Israeli leaders, Khan told Amanpour: “Nobody is above the law.”
Clooney and the other legal experts also said the charges sought by the ICC prosecutor have nothing to do with the reasons for the conflict. “The charges concern waging war in a manner that violates the long-established rules of international law that apply to armed groups and the armed forces in every state in the world,” their op-ed said, adding, “The law we apply is humanity’s law, not the law of any given side.”