Top Israeli government and security officials have overseen a nine-year surveillance operation targeting the ICC and Palestinian rights groups to try to thwart a war crimes probe, a joint investigation reveals.
+972 Magazine, along with Local Call and Guardian, released a piece today on their investigation into the operation, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to prevent the ICC from opening a probe into war crimes committed by Israel.
Israel’s attack on ICC
According to +972 Magazine:
Moreover, according to several sources, Israel’s underhanded efforts to interfere with the investigation — which could amount to offenses against the administration of justice, punishable by a prison sentence — have been managed from the very top. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to have taken a keen interest in the operation, even sending intelligence teams “instructions” and “areas of interest” regarding their monitoring of ICC officials. One source stressed that Netanyahu was “obsessed, obsessed, obsessed” with finding out what materials the ICC was receiving.
The intelligence information obtained via surveillance was passed on to a secret team of top Israeli government lawyers and diplomats, who traveled to The Hague for confidential meetings with ICC officials in an attempt to “feed [the chief prosecutor] information that would make her doubt the basis of her right to be dealing with this question.” The intelligence was also used by the Israeli military to retroactively open investigations into incidents that were of interest to the ICC, to try to prove that Israel’s legal system is capable of holding its own to account.
Additionally, as the Guardian reported earlier today, the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, ran its own parallel operation which sought out compromising information on Bensouda and her close family members in an apparent attempt to sabotage the ICC’s investigation. The agency’s former head, Yossi Cohen, personally attempted to “enlist” Bensouda and manipulate her into complying with Israel’s wishes, according to sources familiar with his activities, causing the then-prosecutor to fear for her personal safety.
Could you imagine being in the shoes of Bensouda? Working for the ICC, investigating a government for alleged war crimes and someone who previously held a position above you is actively trying to get you to comply with the orders of the government you’re investigating? She must have felt like she had a huge, brightly colored target on her back as she continued doing her job and investigating Netanyahu’s administration.
Karmis Khan is the current ICC prosecutor who replaced Bensouda. He had the strength to publicly request arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, and leaders of Hamas. While it’s easy to see the point being made by people arguing that you can’t equate the two, that is irrelevant. The charges of alleged war crimes against both parties don’t insinuate that the leaders of a terrorist organization and the Prime Minister of Israel are on the same level, but that they both committed war crimes.
On Khan’s announcement by +972:
The prime minister had good reason to be concerned: last week, Khan announced that his office is seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three leaders in Hamas’ political and military wings, in relation to alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on or since October 7. The announcement made clear that additional warrants — which expose prosecuted individuals to arrest should they visit any of the ICC’s 124 member states — may yet be pursued.
For Israel’s top brass, Khan’s announcement was no surprise. In recent months, the surveillance campaign targeting the chief prosecutor “climbed to the top of the agenda,” according to one source, thus giving the government advance knowledge of his intentions.
At the end of the prosecutor’s statement he issued a demand that was very telling. Khan demanded that “all attempts to impede, intimidate, or improperly influence of this court must cease immediately.” This shows that he is aware of Israel’s attempt to escape the probe into war crimes using surveillance, manipulation, and coercion. It’s also something people can point to and say, “If Netanyahu did not commit any war crimes, why has he been working so hard to impede the ICC’s investigation? That’s not the behavior of someone who is innocent.”
Israel says the ICC has no jurisdiction over them because they did not sign the Rome Statute, which formed the court. They also point to the fact that Palestine is not a United Nations member state. Palestine became an ICC member after signing the 2015 convention, and was recognized as a UN observer state 3 years before.
From +972:
Palestine’s entry into the ICC was condemned by Israeli leaders as a form of “diplomatic terrorism.” “It was perceived as the crossing of a red line, and perhaps the most aggressive thing the Palestinian Authority has ever done to Israel in the international arena,” an Israeli official explained. “To be recognized as a state in the UN is nice, but the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.”
Immediately after becoming a member of the court, the PA asked the prosecutor’s office to investigate crimes committed in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, starting from the date on which the State of Palestine accepted the court’s jurisdiction: July 13, 2014. Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor at the time, opened a preliminary examination to determine whether the criteria for a full investigation could be met.
Fearing the legal and political consequences of potential prosecutions, Israel raced to prepare intelligence teams in the army, the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence), and the Mossad (foreign intelligence), alongside a covert team of military and civilian lawyers, to lead the effort to forestall a full ICC investigation. All this was coordinated under Israel’s National Security Council (NSC), whose authority is derived from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Everyone, the entire military and political establishment, was looking for ways to damage the PA’s case,” said one intelligence source. “Everyone pitched in: the Justice Ministry, the Military International Law Department [part of the Military Advocate General’s Office], the Shin Bet, the NSC. [Everyone] saw the ICC as something very important, as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel had to be defended against. It was described in military terms.”
Learning how angry Israel was about the Palestinian Authority joining the ICC, it almost makes one wonder if the current war is being used as a way to exact retribution against the PA by destroying them and exterminating Palestinian civilians to get rid of that thorn in Netanyahu’s side once and for all. Instead of stealing the land by way of illegal settlements in the West Bank, why not demolish everything on the land and either drive out or kill the Palestinians there and then claim the land, rebuild everything the way Netanyahu wants and then move the settlers into a permanent new city in Israel? While that may sound hyperbolic, members of Netanyahu’s cabinet have already said, in public statements, that they want to flatten the land, destroy everything, and drive the Palestinian people into the Sinai desert so Israel can take over the land.
As reported by NBC NEWS at the time, these statements were public in Israel:
Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter told Israeli Channel 12 over the weekend that the war would be “Gaza’s Nakba,” using the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that many use to describe the 1948 displacement of roughly 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled from their land in what became Israel.
“We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” Dichter, a member of the right-wing Likud party, said Saturday, in comments widely reported by Israeli media. “From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war — as the Israeli army seeks to do in Gaza — with masses between the tanks and the soldiers,” he said. Pressed on his use of the word “Nakba” to describe the situation in Gaza, he said again: “Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end
Another Israeli official said in an email to Netanyahu that they needed to create “sterile zones in the West Bank, particularly around the olives. Palestinians in the West Bank are dependent on their olives as a source of income. The statement sparked violence against an elderly couple when Settlers attacked them as they picked olives. An olive farmer was also attacked and killed while attending to his crops. Another official suggested they drop a nuclear bomb in Gaza.
Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu sparked outcry after he suggested that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities” in the current conflict.
Eliyahu was quickly suspended from Cabinet meetings, as Netanyahu said in a post on X that the minister’s words were not “based in reality.”
Please visit +972 Magazine’s new piece on the investigation that came out today. There are just too many details and so much information to cover all of it in this post. The article is called: Surveillance and interference: Israel’s covert war on the ICC exposed written by Yuval Abraham and Meron Rapoport. You might remember Yuval from another piece talked about on Zany—The Lavender AI system used by the IDF to generate “kill lists” for the army.
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