November 25, 2024
JAKARTA – The Foreign Ministry has said it supports the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant, describing them as a way to ensure accountability for war crimes in Palestine.
The court issued the arrest warrants late last week, accusing the two officials of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
The ICC’s move came as the death toll from Israel’s military campaign in Gaza reportedly passed 44,000 since the start of the war in October of last year, when a surprise attack launched by Hamas sparked a massive reprisal from Israel.
“The issuance of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant represents a significant step toward achieving justice for the crimes against humanity and war crimes in Palestine,” the Foreign Ministry said on X on Saturday.
“Indonesia emphasizes that these arrest warrants must be carried out in full accordance with international law,” the ministry said and reiterated its support for all other initiatives aimed at ensuring accountability for Israel for its actions in Palestine.
When issuing the warrants, The Hague-based ICC said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Netanyahu and Gallant bore “criminal responsibility” for the “war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts”.
Netanyahu rejected the decision, describing it as “driven by anti-Semitic hatred of Israel”, while Hamas said the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant had set an “important historical precedent”, AFP reported.
United States President Joe Biden, whose country is a key ally of Israel, called the warrants against the Israeli leaders “outrageous”, but other world leaders and rights groups supported the court.
The ICC also issued a warrant for Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, saying it had grounds to suspect him of war crimes and crimes against humanity in relation to the attacks on Israel that sparked the war. Israel said it killed Deif in July, but Hamas has not confirmed his death, AFP reported.
Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which triggered the Gaza war, resulted in the deaths of 1,206 people, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.
On Saturday, Indonesia renewed its support for “ending Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestinian territories” and once again called for “the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, in accordance with the principles of the two-state solution”.
The two-state solution is a vision of creating independent states of Israel and Palestine to end the decades-long conflict in the Middle East.
But Netanyahu on numerous occasions has expressed his opposition to the two-state solution, calling it an “existential threat” to Israeli statehood.
Since the conflict in Gaza escalated last year, Indonesia has been making diplomatic efforts to promote a permanent ceasefire, both in bilateral engagements with its partners and through multilateral forums such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the United Nations.
Earlier this month at the extraordinary summit of the OIC and the Arab League in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Deputy Foreign Minister Anis Matta urged the international community to sever all economic, trade and investment ties with Israel as a means of pressuring the country to end its aggression against Palestine.
Jakarta has also sent humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip via Egypt.