On November 21, the Pre-Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced it had issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas military wing commander Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, aka Deif, who Israel says was killed in action.

It took six months for the Pre-Trial Chamber to make a decision on Prosecutor Karim Khan’s application for arrest warrants, and it took him no less than eight months after October 7, 2023, to file the petitions for these warrants. Before that, it took Khan’s predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, almost seven years to initiate an investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes in Palestine since 2014. Given the degree and scale of war crimes in Gaza before and after October 7, 2023, the sluggishness of the ICC is hard to understand or accept.

The Pre-Trial Chamber has indicated that it had “reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare”.

Judging by the space afforded to this charge in the ICC’s press release, humanitarian aid issues seem to be the principal charges against Netanyahu and Gallant. But considering the death toll – which may be as high as 186,000 – and the sheer devastation of Gaza’s overall infrastructure and specifically medical facilities and schools, it is troubling that “the Chamber found that the material provided by the Prosecution only allowed it to make findings on two incidents that qualified as attacks that were intentionally directed against civilians”. Just two incidents?

By contrast, the Pre-Trial Chamber was also able to conclude that Deif, the elusive Hamas commander, was “responsible for the crimes against humanity of murder; extermination; torture; and rape and other form of sexual violence; as........

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