The ICC has challenged Israel’s prime minister and his former defense minister for the Gaza atrocities. Several other cabinet members have contributed to these crimes. But none have been charged for these crimes. Should they be charged? Could they be charged?
New York (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Recently, a classified report by a U.S. government watchdog discovered that Israeli military units have committed “many hundreds” of potential violations of U.S. human rights law in the Gaza Strip. The findings by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General mark the first time a U.S. government report has acknowledged the scale of Israeli actions in Gaza that fall under the purview of Leahy Laws that bar U.S. assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of gross human rights abuses. Indirectly, these findings also highlight U.S. complicity in the Gaza genocide, due to continuing arms transfers and financing.
Conveniently, the story was released only after two years of Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza. In light of an avalanche of international reports during the period, the classified report represents a tip of iceberg.
And yet, in November 2024, after an investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for only two Israeli government leaders: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant. The two were alleged to be responsible for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts in early Gaza war (genocide was not included.)
Notably, the warrant against Netanyahu was the first against the leader of the U.S.-led West-backed country for war crimes. But were the two really the sole cabinet leaders responsible for the genocidal atrocities?
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Effectively, there are circles of Israeli officials who share complicity for the Gaza genocide, including high-profile ministers, internationally-less known enablers, military and intelligence architects of obliteration, Netanyahu’s veteran advisor and the president.
Supporting Netanyahu and Gallant, there were at least half a dozen cabinet members who contributed to those brutalities, with some insisting on more destructive measures and protracted bombardment.
Even before Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza, the Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of the far-right and supremacist Jewish Power party, had long promoted the expulsion of “non-loyal” Arab citizens, the full blockade of Gaza, the Judaization of Israel-occupied Palestinian territories and total elimination of Hamas and all who support Palestinian resistance.
Ben-Gvir has been seconded by Bezazel Smotrich, the far-right leader of the national religious Zionists and Netanyahu’s Minister of Finance and Defense, who has tried to use the Gaza War to annex the West Bank to the pre-1967 Israel. A self-proclaimed racist and fascist, Smotrich promoted the blockade of the Gaza Strip calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza.
Still another hardliner is Netanyahu’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz. As Netanyahu’s Energy Minister in October 2023, Katz had famously declared a complete siege of Gaza: no “electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter.” More recently, now-Defense Minister Katz pledged that Gaza will be destroyed, and that anyone who stays in Gaza City will be considered “terrorists and terror supporters.”
Objecting to any humanitarian aid to Gaza, Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, Ben-Gvir’s party colleague, suggested “nuking” the Strip to get rid of the “monsters of Gaza,” including women and children. Despite a global debacle, Netanyahu did not fire Eliyahu. In May 2025, the emboldened minister said Israel should bomb Gaza’s food and fuel reserves, to starve the population.
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Like Eliyahu, Settlement Minister Orit Strook believes that death and devastation in Gaza served God’s purpose: Israel’s national redemption. That’s why she opposed all ceasefire efforts. Hamas and Palestinians had to be eradicated so that the Messianic Jewish settlers can rebuild Azza; that is, the Judaized Gaza.
The enablers
Though less known internationally, another set of cabinet members contributed to the protracted genocidal atrocities. After October 7, then Information Minister Galit-Distel Atbaryan posted her infamous tweet: “Erase Gaza from the face of the earth… and fire and brimstone on the heads of the Nazis in Judea and Samaria (the Hebraized term for the West Bank).”
Transportation Minister Miri Regev, a former IDF brigadier-general and IDF spokeswoman who likes to describe herself as a “happy fascist,” criticized efforts to detain Israeli soldiers in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp – the Israeli version of Abu Ghraib and the best-known node of “a network of torture camps.”
Promoting the full removal of all Palestinians from Gaza, Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi had a central role in the censure of international media in Israel and the occupied territories, including the shutdown of Al Jazeera’s Israel bureau. Many of these views were supported by Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, a promoter of the West Bank’s annexation.
Months before October 7, Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli stated that the Palestinian Authority was a “neo-Nazi entity” and antisemitic and that it was necessary to “examine alternatives to its existence.” Chikli has built special ties with European far-right movements and led over 100 civil initiatives to align international sentiments with the cabinet’s view that Hamas is a collection of human animals and Nazi antisemites. In October, he invited Tommy Robinson, a British far-right anti-Islam activist with a dark history of criminal convictions, to Israel – despite objections and criticism by the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
Then there was the Minister for Social Equality and as Minister for Women’s Empowerment May Golan, long haunted by bribery and fraud allegations. Golan is Netanyahu’s openly racist appointee, who had hoped to serve as Israel consul general in New York City until her appointment was rejected. She called for another Nakba” (lit. “Catastrophe” in Arabic referring to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948), to cleanse all Palestinians from Gaza.
Despite their supportive roles and accessorial liability in the Palestinian genocide, none of these cabinet members have been charged by the ICC.
The architects of obliteration
Another set of decision-makers features those Israeli leaders who have had a direct or indirect role in the military doctrine that was deployed in Gaza. Gila Gamliel belongs to Netanyahu’s set of key ministers but as the Minister of Intelligence she also represented the country’s intelligence elite. Since October 2023, she has been in charge of plans of Gaza’s ethnic cleansing to cash on the expulsion via real estate development and by resettling far-right Messianic settlers in Gaza.
The Netanyahu cabinet has also included veteran military leaders whose role was crucial long before and after October 7. They pioneered what can be called the obliteration doctrine, a lethal mix of scorched earth policy, collective responsibility and civilian victimization, coupled with massive indiscriminate bombardment and systematic use of artificial intelligence. As Prof. William Schabas, a leading scholar of genocide, has noted, ‘the obliteration doctrine’ “adds a new term to the lexicon on genocide, notably in the application of international law and its judicial mechanisms.”
As I have demonstrated, this doctrine accounts for the decimation of urban infrastructure and the genocidal atrocities in Gaza. Already in 2006, it was first tested in Dahiya, a Shia Muslim enclave in Beirut. Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, was its architect who pledged it would be used “in the next war.”
In spring 2024, Benny Gantz, the leader of a center-right party and former IDF chief of general staff, was portrayed as a “moderate” alternative to Netanyahu by the U.S. Secretary of State Blinken. And yet, Gantz sat in Netanyahu’s cabinet through the most devastating phase of Israel’s assault against Gaza. Worse, in the past, he has been haunted by several war crime allegations.
Then there was the controversial and tough-talking Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s internal security Shin Bet and veteran politician whose brutal methods in the occupied territories have sparked charges of extrajudicial killing and war crimes since early 2000s. Soon after October 7, Dichter disclosed the Israeli goals: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” adding “Gaza Nakba 2023, that’s how it will end.”
None of these architects of obliteration were featured among the ICC warrants, either.
Netanyahu’s right-hand and the president
The portrait of Netanyahu’s cabinet also features Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president. Right after October 7, Herzog condemned all residents of Gaza for “collective responsibility” in the Hamas attack on Israel. In this view, there were no innocents in Gaza. The doctrine legitimized the killings of Palestinian women and children who account for 70 percent of the perished in Gaza.
The portrait also includes Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, who recently left the cabinet but remains PM’s close advisor. He was intimately linked with the PM’s fatal decisions regarding Gaza. These included a covert plan to “thin” the Palestinian population in Gaza “to a minimum,” by the creation of a “humanitarian crisis” to transfer the refugees away from the area.
Neither Herzog nor Dermer have had to worry about an ICJ warrant.
Furthermore, these high officials represent just the tip of their bureaucracies in which armies of subordinates implemented their decisions, from Netanyahu’s close confidant Dermer to soldiers who were guided to target women and children, including emergency workers who sought to save the victims; journalists who were silenced; and children who were deliberately shot in the head or the left side of the chest.
In light of the track-record of these and other high-level officials, the ICC arrest warrants for PM Netanyahu and his ex-defense minister Gallant would seem to be largely symbolic.
Secretary Antony J. Blinken meets with Israel’s War Cabinet in Tel Aviv, Israel, January 9, 2024. (Official State Department photo by Chuck Kennedy). 9 January 2024. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Symbolic justice
Normally, a prosecution team would draw a long list of potential indictees and then decide who could be prosecuted, relying on the strength of available evidence and the resources of the prosecution team.
In light of the ICC’s arrest warrants, the prosecutor’s office reportedly had a wider net of names that were considered. The decision to zoom onto just Netanyahu and Gallant was likely motivated by the view that they represented the apex of Israel’s military campaign against Gaza and its people.
Furthermore, the two were charged mainly with war crimes and crimes against humanity, not genocide.
Presumably, the ICC prosecutor office may wait until there is a final ruling on South Africa’s charge of genocide – likely in late 2027 or early 2028 – before deciding whether to add genocide to the list of charges against Netanyahu, Gallant and anyone else that they add to the list.
The effort to charge two Israeli leaders rather than the entire cabinet, whose members have had a substantial role in the genocidal atrocities, does not represent the pursuit of “victims’ justice.” In substance, it is still another instance of “victors’ justice,” as the former colonial powers continue to undermine appropriate genocide prosecution.
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