The ICC is giving succour to Hamas

International Criminal Court (ICC), The Hague
International Criminal Court (ICC), The Hague

This is the proof, if one were needed, that our great international institutions have been perverted beyond comprehension. The International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, discredits the entire concept of international courts and international justice.

The moral inversion is staggering. The Israeli leadership is being pursued “for crimes against humanity and war crimes” – a preposterous claim given that they had to launch a war in self-defence against the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since the 1940s. Hamas are the war criminals.

A system of international law set up to ensure that the Holocaust could never happen again has been weaponised to delegitimise the world’s only Jewish state and seek the arrest of its prime minister for the crime of seeking to prevent another shoah. A Hamas leader was similarly arraigned, but there is no moral or legal equivalence between a democracy seeking to protect its citizens and armed groups whose aim is the eradication of a country and its people.

Israel’s necessary invasion of Gaza has tragically led to civilian casualties. All of these deaths are heartbreaking, though the civilian to combatant ratio – which is hard to gauge accurately given the propaganda and the need to strip out terrorist deaths – is dramatically lower than in other modern urban conflicts, including those involving the West. Hamas wants civilians to die: it uses them as human shields. The terror group is morally responsible for all of the death and destruction in Gaza.

We are fast moving to a world where the right to self-defence is robbed of any meaning, where it is only tolerated if zero civilians are harmed, which of course is impossible. To Left-wing international lawyers, the casualties caused by the Allied advance across Europe in 1944/5 would surely now count as a war crime. D-Day led to the deaths of many French civilians – it too would have been deemed unlawful by these delusional, moral arbiters.

Mr Netanyahu will now be unable to travel to countries that are ICC signatories, including the UK. In the Commons Sir Keir Starmer repeated his view that Israel had a right to self-defence and yet the British Government has egged on the ICC. In one of his first acts as Foreign Secretary, David Lammy announced that the UK would no longer oppose the ICC’s initial move against Israel. The British Government has behaved disgracefully. Doubtless the mullahs in Iran will be delighted.