( Middle East Monitor ) – Amal Clooney, wife of Hollywood actor George Clooney, and renowned human rights lawyer provided an “expert report” supporting the ICC’s arrest warrant application for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and three senior Hamas officials, she said in a statement.
Published on the Clooney Foundation for Justice’s website, the statement said that Clooney joined a panel of international legal experts to evaluate evidence of suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and Gaza.
She wrote, ““More than four months ago, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court asked me to assist him with evaluating evidence of suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and Gaza. I agreed and joined a panel of international legal experts to undertake this task. Together we have engaged in an extensive process of evidence review and legal analysis including at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.”
“The Panel and its academic advisers are experts in international law, including international humanitarian law and international criminal law,” she explained.
“Despite our diverse personal backgrounds, our legal findings are unanimous. We have unanimously determined that the Court has jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestine and by Palestinian nationals.”
“We unanimously conclude that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and extermination,” she continued.
Explaining her reason for agreeing to take on this role when she was approached by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan four months ago, Clooney explained: “As a human rights lawyer, I will never accept that one child’s life has less value than another’s. I do not accept that any conflict should be beyond the reach of the law, nor that any perpetrator should be above the law.”
“I hope that justice will prevail in a region that has already suffered too much.”
Clooney, who is of Lebanese origins, has faced months of criticism of failing to speak out against Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza which has killed more than 35,500 Palestinians to date.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. A further paragraph from Ms. Clooney’s letter has been quoted.
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