UN special rapporteur on the rights to food, Michael Fakhri, on Friday said that it is time for world to enforce International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a former defense minister.
“The finding by the ICC that there are reasonable grounds that Netanyahu and Gallant are guilty of crimes against humanity and using starvation as a method of warfare reflects what we have all known for months.”
The court said Thursday it “found reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant bear criminal responsibility for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
It also believes that both “bear criminal responsibility as civilian superiors for the war crime of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.”
The warrants come as Israel’s genocidal offensive in Gaza recently entered its second year, having already killed some 44,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.
The Israeli onslaught has displaced almost the entire population of the territory amid an ongoing and deliberate blockade that has led to severe shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, pushing the population to the brink of starvation.