Amal Clooney is among the group of U.K.-based lawyers who expressed their support for ICC (International Criminal Court) prosecutor Karim Khan’s decision to request a warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and three Hamas leaders.
On Monday morning, Clooney and the panel of legal experts published a report in which they shared that they were asked to provide an opinion on whether there were reasonable grounds to believe that the Israeli and Hamas leaders had committed war crimes. In the report, the panel declared that it agrees with Khan’s assessment.
In a statement shared on the site for the Clooney Foundation for Justice, Clooney wrote that she served on this panel because she believes “in the rule of law and the need to protect civilian lives.”
“The law that protects civilians in war was developed more than 100 years ago and it applies in every country in the world regardless of the reasons for a conflict,” Clooney continued. “As a human rights lawyer, I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s. I do not accept that any conflict should be beyond the reach of the law, nor that any perpetrator should be above the law. So I support the historic step that the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has taken to bring justice to victims of atrocities in Israel and Palestine.”
In an op-ed published by The Financial Times coinciding with the report’s release, Clooney and the other five lawyers — Adrian Fulford, Theodor Meron, Danny Friedman, Helena Kennedy and Elizabeth Wilmhurst — shared that they “engaged in an extensive process of review and analysis,” including witness statements, expert evidence, official communications, videos and photographs to form their decision.
The group ultimately unanimously agreed with Khan’s conclusion that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that three of Hamas’s most senior leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh — have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity for the killing of hundreds of civilians, the taking of at least 245 hostages and acts of sexual violence committed against Israeli hostages.”
They also found that evidence presented by Khan “provides reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Israel’s minister of defence Yoav Gallant have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity,” which includes “the war crime of intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the murder and persecution of Palestinians as crimes against humanity.”
In their op-ed, the legal experts noted that the charges against the powerful figures “have nothing to do with the reasons for the conflict,” as their actions violate the “long-established rules of international law that apply to armed groups and the armed forces in every state of the world.”
