OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Israel will tell the International
Criminal Court it does not recognize the authority of the tribunal, which is
planning to investigate possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories, the
news website Ynet reported on Thursday.
اضافة اعلان
The Israeli website said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
had decided not to cooperate with the inquiry after meeting with senior
ministers and government officials ahead of a Friday deadline to respond to an
ICC notification letter.
One Israeli official confirmed to Reuters that the
government would indeed respond to the court's letter. But Israel did not
immediately expand on what the response would entail.
Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute that established
the ICC and therefore by definition not a party to the court.
ICC prosecutors said letters had been sent on March 9 to all
parties concerned, giving them a month to inform the court if they were
conducting their own investigations into the alleged crimes and want an ICC
inquiry deferred while that is ongoing.
The Palestinians said they would cooperate with the ICC,
whose inquiry pertains to alleged war crimes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank
and in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian Islamists took control after Israel
withdrew in 2005.
"We sent the response to the ICC," said Omar
Awadallah, a senior official in the Palestinian Foreign Ministry.
"Full cooperation with the ICC will continue from the
State of Palestine, as a member state of the court, to achieve justice for the
victims of the Palestinian people and hold Israel accountable for its crimes,”
Awadallah said.
In a speech on Wednesday marking Israeli observances of the
Holocaust, Netanyahu deemed the ICC inquiry an "absurdity".
"The Hague court's founding was inspired by the
Nuremberg tribunal, which tried Nazi war criminals after World War Two,"
he said. "But a body set up to defend human rights became a body that,
effectively, protects those who trample on human rights."
He was referring to Palestinian militant group Hamas,
against which Israel fought a 2014 war in Gaza and which an ICC prosecutor said
may also have perpetrated crimes. (Reporting by Dan Williams and Ari
Rabinovitch Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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