NEW YORK CITY: The warrant issued last week by the International Criminal Court for the arrest of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has “nothing to do with his faith and everything to do with his crimes,” the Palestinian envoy to the UN told the Security Council on Monday.
Riyad Mansour urged council members to stand up to what he described as Netanyahu’s “diversions and distortions, to his smearing, his threats and his attacks.”
Netanyahu has denounced the ICC decision as “antisemitic,” comparing it to the Dreyfus affair in France more than a century ago. Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish descent, was wrongfully convicted in 1894 of treason based on fabricated evidence.
“No, Netanyahu is not Dreyfus,” Mansour told the Security Council. “The ICC, the ICJ (International Court of Justice), this council and the General Assembly, the secretary-general and the United Nations are not antisemitic, and Netanyahu’s efforts to frame efforts to uphold international law as antisemitic must be firmly rebuked.”
The council must “act now to restore primacy to international law, to the humanitarian and human rights laws that Israel is shredding to the detriment of all,” he added.
He warned that the “genocide” in Gaza is transforming the Middle East for generations to come, with “the gravest” repercussions for the region and the wider world.
“This fire will devour everything in its path if it is not urgently stopped,” Mansour said, and so states are faced with a “quite simple” choice: defend the rule of international law or defend “the massacres perpetrated by this Israeli government.”
He called on politicians who have “difficulties making the right choice” to stop “playing political games with our people’s lives,” and added: “Our children should not be sacrificed for the sake of your political calculations and ambitions.”
Palestinians in Gaza are bracing themselves to endure another winter living in makeshift tents, besieged and bombed, without any of the essential infrastructure required to sustain life, while famine continues to loom over the war-ravaged enclave, Mansour warned.
“How much more suffering must they endure?” he asked. “Their agony must be brought to an end and life and hope must be restored. Israel’s war machine must be stopped in Palestine and in Lebanon. It is sowing the conditions of insecurity and hatred for decades.”
He urged council members not to allow “a solvable political conflict to be transformed into an eternal religious conflict. This would have terrible, unimaginable consequences for our region and the world.”
He added: “The fate of our region is being determined in Gaza: either Gaza becomes the graveyard of international law or the land of its resurrection.”
Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the UN, told fellow council members that Washington remains opposed to the annexation of the West Bank and the construction of settlements in Gaza.
Such actions would breach international law, he said, “sow the seeds of further instability and create new obstacles to Israel’s full integration into the region.” He also expressed concern about the “increasing extremist-settler violence in the West Bank.”
But Wood reiterated that the US rejects the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and blames Hamas for the failure to reach a ceasefire agreement. He added that the militant group must not be “let off the hook.”
Dmitry Polyanskiy, Russia’s deputy permanent representative, said: “The USA only demands, and continues to demand, that we all put pressure on Hamas,” yet it is “clear” that Israel’s plan is “to create yet another irreversible fact on the ground: a scorched, depopulated Gaza that has been emptied of Palestinians.”
He added: “How many more people need to die for Gaza to at last see peace? Or will the USA obstruct this until all the Palestinians have been exterminated and the question of the two-state solution falls away by itself?”
Moscow “will continue to insist on the adoption of the most decisive measures to stop the bloodshed in Gaza,” Polyanskiy said.
