Occupied West Bank — On December 2, Eman Nafii was one in every of dozens of Palestinians invited to fulfill Prosecutor Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court within the occupied West Bank. As the spouse of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israel, Nafi needed to talk to Khan about her husband and the Israeli occupation.
But Khan spent a lot of the assembly speaking, earlier than his crew gave Nafi and different Palestinian victims simply 10 minutes to share their tales.
“People got angry. They told him, ‘You are coming to listen to us for 10 minutes? How are we going to tell you about our stories in 10 minutes,” Nafi informed Al Jazeera.
“One of the women (with us) was from Gaza. She lost 30 members of her family in the (ongoing war). She shouted, ‘How can we explain this in 10 minutes.’”
While Khan ended up listening to the victims for about an hour, Palestinians worry that he’s making use of a double customary by solely focusing his efforts on Hamas and ignoring the grave crimes Israel is accused of getting perpetrated over two months of a lethal warfare.
Many have been disillusioned that Khan accepted an Israeli invitation to go to Israeli communities and areas that Hamas attacked on October 7, whereas declining a suggestion from Palestinians to go to the lots of of unlawful Israeli settlements, checkpoints and refugee camps within the occupied West Bank.
During his three-day go to, Israel additionally didn’t permit Khan to enter Gaza, the place Israel has killed greater than 17,000 folks and displaced a lot of the besieged enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants from their houses since October 7.
Most of these killed have been ladies and youngsters, whereas hundreds of younger males are actually being rounded up, a lot of them stripped and brought to undisclosed areas. Legal consultants have warned that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza could quickly quantity to genocide.
Despite the mounting proof and ongoing atrocities, Khan has proven little curiosity in critically probing Israel, in accordance with Palestinian officers, victims and authorized students.
“Khan became enthusiastic to start this investigation [in the occupied territories] after October 7. That’s alarming,” mentioned Omar Awadallah, who oversees UN human rights organisations as a part of the Palestinian Authority, the political physique governing the West Bank.
“[The Palestinian Authority] gave him retroactive jurisdiction from 2014. [Khan] cannot say that he didn’t see crimes being committed [in the occupied territories] from 2014 until October 7,” Awadallah informed Al Jazeera.
A viable different?
On January 2, 2015, the state of Palestine grew to become a signatory to the Rome Statute, giving the ICC jurisdiction to analyze atrocities similar to warfare crimes, crimes towards humanity and genocide within the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
The transfer was perceived as a victory for Palestinian and Israeli human rights teams, which have been fed up with the Israeli judicial system for not punishing Israeli officers, settlers and troopers who have been committing crimes within the occupied territories similar to land theft and extrajudicial killings.
According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organisation that opposes unlawful settlements within the West Bank, Palestinians harmed by Israeli troopers have a lower than one p.c probability of acquiring justice in the event that they file a grievance in Israel.
While the ICC presents an alternative choice to Israeli courts, no arrest warrants have been issued towards Israeli officers or troopers for committing warfare crimes and crimes towards humanity in Gaza and the West Bank, in accordance with a authorized skilled from Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights organisation that advocates for justice in Gaza.
“We have submitted plenty of legal analysis and evidence to the office of the prosecutor even before Khan was elected,” the skilled, who requested for anonymity because of a worry of reprisal from Israeli authorities, informed Al Jazeera. “We believe that [Khan’s] office has enough evidence to issue warrants for Israeli political and military leaders by now.”
After getting back from his three-day go to to Israel and the West Bank, Khan launched an announcement that made little point out of the mounting proof implicating Israel in committing crimes towards humanity similar to that of apartheid within the West Bank and warfare crimes within the West Bank and Gaza.
Khan merely mentioned that his go to was not “investigative in nature” and referred to as on Israel to respect the authorized rules of “distinction, precaution and proportionality” in its ongoing bombing marketing campaign and floor offensive in Gaza.
Khan had a distinct tone when addressing Hamas’s October 7 assaults, calling them “serious international crimes that shock the conscience of humanity”.
Khan’s assertion angered the Palestinian victims that he met briefly in Ramallah.
“What made us really unhappy was what he wrote after the visit,” mentioned Nafi. “He is not supposed to draw an equivalence between the victim and their killers. We wanted him to tell the Israelis to stop what they are doing to detainees and to [stop] what they’re doing to Gaza.”
Al Jazeera submitted written inquiries to Khan’s workplace which raised Palestinian criticisms of his go to to the West Bank and his assertion. His workplace responded by emailing Al Jazeera a number of of Khan’s earlier statements, with out answering any of the questions.
Politically compromised?
In September 2021, Khan mentioned that he would deprioritise crimes dedicated by American forces in Afghanistan and focus his probe on the atrocities that the Taliban and the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-Okay) carried out.
Critics consider that Khan was acquiescing to political strain from the United States – a state that’s not a celebration to the Rome Statute – which sanctioned Khan’s predecessor for daring to open a case towards American troops in Afghanistan.
But Khan justified his choice by claiming that the court docket had restricted sources and that the Taliban and Islamic State dedicated extra severe crimes. Palestinians now worry that Khan may cite the same justification to analyze Hamas, however not Israel.
“We have yet to see that any prosecutor has taken the question of Palestine seriously, which shows that the whole system of international law has been torn into pieces,” mentioned Diana Buttu, a Palestinian authorized scholar.
Buttu added that the ICC has successfully grow to be a court docket that acts within the political curiosity of highly effective Western states, fairly than in accordance with strict authorized rules.
She cited Khan’s choice to indict Russian President Vladimir Putin on accounts of warfare crimes dedicated throughout Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The ICC has become a very political court that managed to issue indictments against Putin,” she informed Al Jazeera. “But eight weeks into what is presumably the worst man-made disaster [in Gaza] and the prosecutor has remained silent and only comes [to visit] at the request of Israel.”
Nafi agreed and added that Khan can’t declare to be ignorant or unaware of Israel’s atrocities towards Palestinians.
“How many people does he want to see killed until he speaks up,” she informed Al Jazeera. “I want him to be brave enough, to say the truth and to say it in public.”
Additional reporting by Al Jazeera correspondent Zein Basravi.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/9/alarming-palestinians-accuse-icc-prosecutor-of-bias-after-israel-visit?traffic_source=rss
