BIG BLOW To Netanyahu As ALL NEW Genocide Charges Drop!

Right, so whilst the world focuses on a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, hopes it is a more meaningful one than the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon has been, yet unfortunately appears to be little more than a scam to please Trump, that isn’t to say problems for Benjamin Netanyahu aren’t stacking up. He’s a wanted man. An arrest warrant has been issued by the ICC for him, under his Prime Ministership Israel has been dragged to the ICJ for war crimes and crimes against humanity, the crime of genocide and now he can add another to the mix as well as an Israeli lawyer, one of his own people, has now submitted files to the ICC himself against Netanyahu and seven other Israeli figures and that he felt obligated to do this as a Jew, consumed as he is, as an Israeli himself, by Israel’s crimes and impunity.
The guy in question is called Omer Shatz, he left Israel in 2014 after losing a court case against Yoav Gallant, but upon doing so told the court somewhat prophetically, that in 10 years time, there will be a genocide and so it has come to pass. Will he have better luck at the ICC 10 years later?
Right, so this is a fascinating and going rather underreported story involving Benjamin Netanyahu being dragged to court once again, this time by one of his fellow Israelis, the now France based lawyer Omer Shatz and his students at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences where he now works, his International Law In Action Students, who have spent the last year collating a 170 page filing to be submitted to the International Criminal Court, bringing further evidence of genocide levied at 8 figures in Israel.
Now as we know, currently there are arrest warrants out for Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, who Shatz tried unsuccessfully to bring a genocide case against at the Israeli Supreme Court in 2014 due to the actions of Israel, then slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza under the guise of Operation Protective Edge and at which point he gave the warning to the judges that in 10 years there will be a genocide. He was only out by a year, the genocide beginning of course following the night of October 7th, hostages being taken ending up being the excuse Israel felt it needed to basically level Gaza from north to south as they have quite clearly now done.
Now you might be wondering about jurisdiction here since Israel is not a signatory of the Rome Statute and as such won’t be covered under the remit of the ICC and that would be correct ordinarily, and the fact the State of Palestine, including Gaza are signatories and covered by the remit of the ICC, but Shatz is exploiting a bit of a legal loophole here.
You see whilst the ICC has set out a case of genocide against Netanyahu and Gallant and given the remit to do so because of what has happened in their member state, in Gaza, despite attempts to get that struck down and for some states to refuse to acknowledge the ICC remit on the basis of Israel not being a member state; the Israeli courts have flatly refused to prosecute anybody regarding any claims of committing genocide. However, there is a provision within the Genocide Convention, so let’s set the Rome Statute aside, lets look at the Genocide Convention instead, which Israel is signed up to and within that is a mechanism called Complementarity.
Now this came about when the ICC was set up in 2002. It was decided at this point that there would be no such thing as immunity or amnesty when it came to the most serious crimes, being genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, because these crimes were so serious any leniency risked other nations due to the precedent that would be set, it is why all the talk of the ICC having no jurisdiction where Israel is concerned is so dangerous, because this attempts to bring about exceptionalism, and Israel cannot be placed on a pedestal and treated differently to everybody else.
Now at the heart of this new ICC system being set up was the belief that national courts should deal with cases of such serious crimes first and foremost, that they should try and deal with said issues happening within their own borders themselves first and that the ICC should be a court of last resort, a phrase that has been going around in the press a bit thanks to ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan and I’ll come onto him in relation to all his case against Netanyahu and Gallant in a moment, but this meant that the ICC would be there as a complementary structure to the national judicial system and this ensures that accused persons remain protected, have a right to escalate their case if they feel they have been persecuted wrongly by their own national court, it ensures national sovereignty is always respected, it promotes greater efficiency, because it means the ICC don’t have to try all serious cases and most crucially to the case we’re talking about here, it puts the onus on states to do their duty under national and international law to investigate and prosecute serious crimes.
Complementarity kicks in when a state does not meet it’s obligations here. It exists both in the Rome Statute and the genocide Convention and it is due to that latter point that this is the route Omer Shatz is going down, because the ICJ have decided there is a plausible case for genocide, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant and yet Israeli prosecutors refuse to bring a case against any of the eight people Shatz has named in his case, therefore Israel is not doing its national duty here and therefore under the terms of Complementarity, the ICC can step in. It’s a very complex issue, I hope I’ve explained it in an understandable fashion, it also goes to show the calibre of lawyer Omer Shatz is, he also happens to be a counsel to the ICC, that this is the way through to get to Israel and these 8 individuals he’s named in his filing.
The eight people he and his students have built a case against are Benjamin Netanyahu, former defence minister Yoav Gallant, current defence minister Israel Katz, Israeli president Isaac Herzog, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, the architect of the so called General’s Plan, retired General Giora Eiland and television journalist Zvi Yehezkeli, the Arab Affairs correspondent for Israel’s News 13.
To explain how all of this has come to be in practice, here’s an excerpt from an excellent article written by my fireind Steve Walker of Skwawkbox, in an article titled ‘Israeli lawyer files genocide case with ICC against Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and 6 others’, which reads:
‘Shatz’s 170-page submission took him and eight of his International Law in Action students at the Paris Institute of Political Sciences a year to prepare. It accuses the eight of having “publicly and directly incited others to commit genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza” and tells ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan that he “should not wait until everyone is dead”.
The dossier contains examples of the genocidal statements uttered on an almost-daily basis by Israeli leaders, for example Eiland –“These people will perish in Gaza… [the women] are all the mothers, sisters or wives of the Hamas killers” and “Gaza is very similar to Nazi Germany.”
Israeli prosecutors have refused to prosecute any of the eight accused despite the findings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), United Nations and others that Israel is (or in the case of the ICJ, is plausibly) committing genocide, so Shatz is invoking ‘complementarity’, the principle under the Genocide Convention giving jurisdiction to the ICC if an accused’s home legal system fails to take action.
Shatz notes that on 24 November, “the [Israeli] government’s legal adviser informed the Supreme Court of his intention not to pursue a criminal investigation, in defiance of the ICJ’s order”, clearly bringing the complementarity provision into play.’
This does bring us nicely to Karim Khan actually and the latest on his case, because it relates.
Yesterday ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan issued a statement in defence of the issuing of the arrest warrants he himself had sought against Netanyahu and Gallant, because the pair of them have basically enabled Khan to do so, have given him more ammunition you might say, and took a swipe at Israel’s courts for failing to investigate the charges of genocide that had been levied against the country, which have given Omer Shatz the potential ‘in’ with his case.
In line with the previous explanation on complementarity, if Israel had begun its own investigation, they could have taken this case of the hands of the ICC, you imagine Israel have missed a trick here, because they could have stonewalled this into silence if they’d agreed to take it on and then dragged their feet, but Israeli figures have been so affronted and been hiding behind false accusations of antisemitism that their own determination to be treated as an exception has instead seen them lose control of this legal mess they are in as a result of their own actions. On top of that it should be noted though, that were Israeli courts to take the case on, they’d have to recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC in this case, as well as the State of Palestine as would be implied, representing Palestine as they do, so Israel would rather have this legal mess it might be argued.
Equally, acknowledgement of Omer Shatz’s case, now being brought to the ICC will elicit much the same response from Israel, though given his experiences of those same court systems from 10 years ago, I daresay Shatz likely fancies a fairer shout at the ICC anyway. It will be interesting to see this progress and see if more arrest warrants end up being issued.
Netanyahu’s problems right now though of course are not solely legal ones and as he’s continued to bomb Gaza with impunity, seemingly right up to the deadline of the ceasefire officially coming into effect on Sunday and even then who’d be surprised if Israel keep going regardless, Hamas have dropped a big fat warning in front of Israel that they won’t forget or forgive the continuation of atrocities and if he thinks he’s going to get away with that, he’s learned nothing. Get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch. Please do also hit like, share and subscribe if you haven’t done so already to ensure you don’t miss out on new daily content and of course help support the channel too which is enormously appreciated and I will hopefully therefore catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.