Jerusalem, Friday
Israel is to host a working group of the International Criminal Court as it weighs whether to probe alleged war crimes in the 2014 Gaza war, an Israeli official said today. The group’s arrival “shortly” will be unprecedented, he told AFP on condition of anonymity, saying the visit was intended to show the ICC team “how the Israeli judicial system works”.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman declined to comment to AFP. The trip is at the request of ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. Under its statutes, the ICC must be satisfied that the state in question is unable or unwilling to pursue the matter itself before the court opens war crimes proceedings.
Israel will seek to convince the visiting ICC team that it intends to see justice done over accusations it used excessive force in the July-August 2014 war in and around the Palestinian territory and events immediately preceeding it.
The official could not say if the group would be given access to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to which Israel controls all passage except across the largely closed Gaza-Egypt border. The 2014 conflict between Israel and Gaza’s Islamist rulers Hamas and other factions killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children, according to UN figures.
On the Israeli side, 73 people were killed, mostly soldiers. Israel and the Palestinians have accused each other of war crimes. Israel is alleged to have used force indiscriminately, while Hamas is accused of firing rockets at Israeli civilian population centres and of using Palestinians as human shields.
The Palestinians formally asked the ICC last year to investigate the Jewish state, which has not signed up to the ICC, for alleged war crimes. Israel vehemently opposes any ICC investigation but officials have said they will cooperate with the body to convince it of the competence of the state’s own courts.
Meanwhile, the launchpad destruction of an advanced Israeli communications satellite may have dealt a blow to the country’s aerospace industry, the Israel Space Agency (ISA) has said.
The unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded during a test in Florida yesterday, destroying the Israeli-built and -owned Amos 6 satellite that Facebook planned to use to beam high-speed internet to sub-Saharan Africa.
Dramatic footage broadcast by ABC News showed the rocket burst into a ball of flame amid what appeared to be a succession of blasts — sending its payload tumbling to the ground as a dense plume of black smoke filled the air.
ISA chairman Yitzchak Ben Yisrael said the blast’s shock waves could reverberate far beyond Cape Canaveral. He said the incident could jeopardise a pending deal for the sale of private Israeli firm and Amos-operator Spacecom to China’s Xinwei group, reportedly worth $285 million (Sh2.8 billion) and conditional on the satellite successfully entering service.
“This is the second blow, ahead of the Chinese deal,” he said, recalling the blackout of the Amos 5 satellite, which like Amos 6 was owned and operated by Spacecom. Communication with the Franco-Italian made Amos 5 was lost in November 2015, four years after it was launched from Kazakhstan.
“There is a major question about the launch and I very much hope that Spacecom is strong enough to overcome these things and to order a new satellite,” Ben Yisrael told Israeli public radio. —AFP
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