ICC: Netanyahu angrily rejects move to seek his arrest

Mr Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, condemned the application to seek his arrest as “an absurd and false order”.

In a public statement in Hebrew, he asked “with what audacity” the ICC would “dare to compare” Hamas and Israel.

The comparison was a “distortion of reality”, Mr Netanyahu said.

He accused the prosecutor of “callously pouring gasoline on the fires of antisemitism that are raging across the world”.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz called the move by Mr Khan an “unrestrained frontal assault” on the victims of the 7 October attacks and a “historical disgrace that will be remembered forever”.

Hamas earlier made its own demand for “the cancellation of all arrest warrants issued against leaders of the Palestinian resistance”.

“Hamas strongly denounces the attempts of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to equate the victim with the executioner,” the group said.

The group also complained that the application for warrants against Mr Netanyahu and Mr Gallant had come “seven months late”, and that other Israeli political and military leaders had not been named alongside them.

The accusations against the Israeli and Hamas leaders stem from the events of 7 October, when waves of Hamas gunmen attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 252 others back to Gaza as hostages. The attack triggered the current war, in which at least 35,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Mr Khan accused the Hamas leaders of having committed crimes including extermination, murder, hostage taking, rape and sexual violence, and torture.

He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister were suspected of crimes including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, murder, intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population, and extermination.