Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney has revealed that she played a crucial role in helping the International Criminal Court (ICC) weigh evidence that led to the decision to seek arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders. In a statement posted on the website of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which she founded with her husband George Clooney, Amal Clooney said she was asked by ICC prosecutor Karim Khan to join an expert panel to evaluate evidence of suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity in Israel and Gaza.
The panel, which included other experts in international law, unanimously agreed that there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh engaged in “hostage-taking, murder, and crimes of sexual violence.” Similarly, the panel found that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had engaged in “starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution, and extermination.”
The ICC’s decision to seek arrest warrants for these leaders has been met with denunciation from Hamas, Israel, and the United States. However, Amal Clooney and other members of the expert panel wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Times on Monday, supporting the ICC’s prosecutions for war crimes in the conflict. They emphasized that the prosecutor’s work was “rigorous, fair, and grounded in the law and the facts.”
Amal Clooney’s involvement in the case comes after she and her foundation faced criticism on social media for not speaking out over the civilian death toll in Gaza. In her statement, Clooney said that she believes in the rule of law and the need to protect civilian lives, and that she served on the panel because of her commitment to these principles. She emphasized that the law that protects civilians in war was developed over 100 years ago and applies in every country in the world, regardless of the reasons for a conflict.
