A prosecutor for the ICC wants Hamas and Israeli leaders detained.

Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are the targets of an arrest warrant request for war crimes made by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC).  According to Karim Khan KC, there were good reasons to think that both men were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity starting on the day that Hamas launched its onslaught on Israel on October 7.  Yoav Gallant, the Israeli minister of defense, Ismail Haniyeh, the political head of Hamas, and Mohammed Deif, the group's military commander, are also wanted for arrest.

For the past three years, the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has its headquarters in The Hague, has been looking into Israel's activities in the occupied territories and, more lately, those of Hamas.  The possibility of prominent Israeli officials being added to the ICC's wanted list has been referred to by Mr. Netanyahu as "an atrocity of historic proportions."

Judges at the International Criminal Court will now determine if they think there is enough evidence to issue arrest warrants; this decision might take weeks or months.  Mr. Khan charged the leaders of Hamas with crimes such as torture, rape and sexual abuse, murder, hostage-taking, and extermination.  "The accusations of crimes against humanity were a component of a broad and organized assault by Hamas and other armed organizations on Israel's civilian population," the statement read.

"Our view is that some of these offenses are still being committed today."  He declared that Hamas was to blame for the "unfathomable anguish caused by intentional cruelty and severe callousness."  He claimed that murder, deliberately launching strikes against a civilian population, extermination, and using famine as a tactic of warfare were among the crimes that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant were suspected of committing.

Israel had "intentionally and systematically denied the civilian population in all regions of Gaza of objects fundamental to human survival," according to evidence Mr. Khan's office possessed.  He claimed that while Israel has the right to self-defense, it cannot do so by engaging in what he called "criminal acts of purposefully causing murder, famine, extreme suffering, and serious injury to body or health of the civilian population."  Benny Gantz, the Israeli war cabinet minister and Mr. Netanyahu's political adversary, criticized the prosecutor's choice.

"It is a fundamental distortion of justice and gross moral bankruptcy to draw analogies between leaders of a murderous terror organization and leaders of a democratic country willing to defend itself against terrible terror," the speaker declared.