ByYONAH JEREMY BOB
Updated:

The Prime Minister's Office on Tuesday responded to the International Criminal Court's partial rejection of Israel's appeal of arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant.

"By rejecting Israel’s appeal, the ICC Appeals Chamber has once again demonstrated that this process is political and not judicial," the Prime Minister's Office said in a press release.

"This ruling will not deter Israel from fulfilling its fundamental duty, defending its citizens and its state, in full accordance with the genuine principles of international law, as we have always done, and as we always will."

Although in April of this year the same ICC Appeals Court granted Israel a temporary reprieve on certain interim jurisdictional issues, late Monday night the court aligned with the lower court on the broader question of whether to continue the arrest warrants.

Two ICC justices dissented from the majority opinion, siding with Israel.

THE INTERNATIONAL Criminal Court building in The Hague: The ICC has no viable plan to bring to justice the Hamas leaders who conceived the mega-atrocity in Israel, or the terrorist organization’s supporters who slaughtered 1,200 civilians and seized 251 people as hostages on October 7, 2023
THE INTERNATIONAL Criminal Court building in The Hague: The ICC has no viable plan to bring to justice the Hamas leaders who conceived the mega-atrocity in Israel, or the terrorist organization’s supporters who slaughtered 1,200 civilians and seized 251 people as hostages on October 7, 2023 (credit: PIROSCHKA VAN DE WOUW/REUTERS)

ICC partially denies Israeli appeal to overturn arrest warrants

While the court dismissed one ground for appeal, it has not yet ruled on two other grounds for appeal. It was unclear why the court issued a separate ruling on only one of the three issues at play.

In one core decision and a show of the ICC Appeal Court's perspective, it rejected Israel's claim that the October 7, 2023, invasion and killing of 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, had fundamentally changed the issues before the court dating back to 2021.

"Therefore, the alleged crimes display a continuity in pattern, even though a certain shift in circumstances may have occurred as a result of the events on and after 7 October 2023," wrote the court in a notable understatement.

Israel fights to overturn ICC arrest warrants

There will still be other potential opportunities for Israel to contest the case prior to indictments.

The November 2024 landmark ruling against Israel had been viewed by the Jewish state as its most devastating legal loss in history, with tremendous diplomatic, public relations, and economic repercussions as well.

However, Israel has been fighting since then to get the ICC's lower court decision overturned to make more arguments against ICC jurisdiction.

Some jurisdictional arguments related to the idea that there is no State of Palestine to give jurisdiction to the ICC, to the idea that the Oslo Accords preclude the Palestinians from seeking ICC involvement, as well as the idea that Israel's own mechanisms for probing alleged war crimes by its soldiers make the ICC's involvement redundant.

The IDF legal division has around 90 open criminal probes against IDF soldiers for potential war crimes, and the IDF's Operational Fact Finding Mechanism has around 350 highly active probes, as well as over 1,000 more preliminary probes into the war.


Jerusalem Post Staff contributed to this report.