Occupied West Bank — On December 2, Eman Nafii was among dozens of Palestinians invited to meet Prosecutor Karim Khan of the International Criminal Court in the occupied West Bank. As the wife of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israel, Nafi wanted to talk to Khan about her husband and the Israeli occupation.
But Khan spent most of the meeting speaking, before his team gave Nafi and the other Palestinian victims just 10 minutes to share their stories.
“People were angry. They said to him: “Are you coming to listen to us for 10 minutes? How are we going to tell you our stories in 10 minutes,” Nafi told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“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 fear he is applying double standards by focusing only his efforts on Hamas and ignoring the serious crimes Israel is accused of perpetrating during more than two months of a murderous war.
Many were disappointed that Khan accepted an Israeli invitation to visit Israeli communities and areas attacked by Hamas on October 7, while declining the Palestinians’ offer to visit hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.
During his three-day visit, Israel also did not allow Khan to enter Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 17,000 people and driven most of the country’s 2.3 million residents from their homes. enclave under siege since October 7.
Most of those killed were women and children, while thousands of young men are now being arrested, many stripped naked and taken to undisclosed locations. Legal experts have warned that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza could soon amount to genocide.
Despite the mounting evidence and ongoing atrocities, Khan has shown little interest in seriously investigating Israel, according to Palestinian officials, victims and legal experts.
“Khan became enthusiastic about launching this investigation (into the occupied territories) after October 7. It is alarming,” said Omar Awadallah, who oversees United Nations human rights organizations. within the Palestinian Authority, the political body governing the West Bank.
“(The Palestinian Authority) gave him retroactive jurisdiction from 2014. (Khan) cannot say that he did not see crimes being committed (in the occupied territories) from 2014 to October 7,” Awadallah told Tel Aviv Tribune.
A viable alternative?
On January 2, 2015, the State of Palestine became a signatory to the Rome Statute, giving the ICC jurisdiction to investigate atrocities such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. .
The ruling was seen as a victory for Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups, who were fed up with the Israeli justice system failing to punish Israeli officials, settlers and soldiers who committed crimes in the occupied territories, such as land theft and extrajudicial killings.
According to Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization that opposes illegal settlements in the West Bank, Palestinians injured by Israeli soldiers have less than one percent chance of getting justice if they file a complaint in Israel.
Although the ICC offers an alternative to Israeli courts, no arrest warrants have been issued for Israeli officials or soldiers for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank, according to a legal expert from Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights organization. who advocates for justice in Gaza.
“We submitted a lot of legal analysis and evidence to the prosecutor’s office even before Khan’s election,” the expert, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals from Israeli authorities, told Tel Aviv Tribune. “We believe that (Khan’s) office now has sufficient evidence to issue arrest warrants against Israeli political and military leaders.”
Returning from his three-day visit to Israel and the West Bank, Khan issued a statement that made little mention of the mounting evidence implicating Israel in the commission of crimes against humanity such as apartheid in the West Bank and war crimes in the West Bank. and Gaza.
Khan simply said his visit was not “investigative in nature” and called on Israel to respect the legal principles of “distinction, precaution and proportionality” in its ongoing bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza.
Khan struck a different tone when addressing the October 7 Hamas attacks, calling them “serious international crimes that shock the conscience of humanity.”
Khan’s statement angered Palestinian victims he met briefly in Ramallah.
“What made us really unhappy was what he wrote after the visit,” Nafi said. “It is not supposed to establish an equivalence between the victim and his killers. We wanted him to tell the Israelis to stop what they are doing to the detainees and to stop what they are doing to Gaza.”
Tel Aviv Tribune submitted written questions to Khan’s office that raised Palestinian criticism of his West Bank visit and statement. His office responded by emailing Tel Aviv Tribune several of Khan’s previous statements, without answering any of the questions.
Politically compromised?
In September 2021, Khan said he would no longer prioritize crimes committed by US forces in Afghanistan and focus his investigation on atrocities carried out by the Taliban and the Islamic State in Khorasan province, the ISKP ( ISIS-K).
Critics say Khan bowed to political pressure from the United States – a state not party to the Rome Statute – which sanctioned Khan’s predecessor for daring to open a case against US troops in Afghanistan.
But Khan justified his decision by saying the court had limited resources and that the Taliban and Islamic State had committed more serious crimes. The Palestinians now fear that Khan could invoke a similar justification for investigating Hamas, but not Israel.
“We have yet to see any prosecutors taking the Palestine issue seriously, which shows that the entire system of international law has been torn apart,” said Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer.
Buttu added that the ICC has effectively become a court that acts in the political interests of powerful Western states, rather than in accordance with strict legal principles.
She cited Khan’s decision to indict Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The ICC has become a very political court that has managed to issue indictments against Putin,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune. “But eight weeks into what is probably 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 cannot claim to be ignorant or oblivious to the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinians.
“How many people does he want to see killed until he speaks out,” she told Tel Aviv Tribune. “I want him to be brave enough and tell the truth and say it in public.”
Additional reporting by Tel Aviv Tribune correspondent Zein Basravi.