The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, strongly condemns ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Palestinian resistance leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh. We stand with all justice-seeking people in the world in welcoming all efforts to prosecute the Zionist war criminals, including but not limited to Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, in international courts. However, we refuse to equate the colonizer and the colonized.  There is no parity, however false, between the victim and the executioner, and we view the attempt to draw such parity by the ICC Prosecutor as one that undermines international law and all fundamental principles of justice.  We are also aware of the threats that the US issued to target the prosecution team to avoid “unilateral” or law-abiding prosecutions.  Heeding these threats only serves to corrupt the international legal order.

For too long, the International Criminal Court has acted not as a neutral arbiter of law and a place to seek justice, but rather as a weapon in the hands of the same imperialist powers that refuse to subject themselves to its judgments, and have always operated above the law. The failure of the ICC to pursue arrest warrants against US and British officials for their egregious war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and its subservience to US threats to launch wars and invasions should its officials be indicted is in striking contrast to its eagerness to pursue cases against African leaders, as well as its swift indictments of Russian officials.

In the case of Palestine, the ICC’s artificially short mandate extends back to 2014, yet Khan failed to seek indictments for any of Israel’s war crimes prior to October 7, 2023. Furthermore, he failed to indict Netanyahu and Gallant for genocide under the Rome statute, instead seeking roughly equivalent charges to those against Palestinian resistance leaders, while filing more charges against the Palestinian resistance than against the genocidal Zionist war criminals.

We have no doubt that any fair tribunal would acquit the leadership of the Resistance from the false propaganda charges levied against them and convict the Zionist officials for their war crimes. However, this does not exempt Khan from his stated responsibility to pursue the application of the law, which means indicting and prosecuting all the Zionist war criminals and holding them accountable for the crimes of genocide, apartheid, torture, colonialism, and further acts of inhumanity which have gone unmentioned in today’s announced charges.

The ICC has functioned as a weapon in the hands of imperialism rather than in the hands of the people of the world against the genocidaires, occupiers, torturers, and exploiters. It is the Palestinian people that we trust, first and foremost, to put the Zionist criminals – and the imperialists who are funding and planning with them – in the docks of the revolutionary courts of our liberated Palestine in its eternal capital, Jerusalem, and to hold them accountable.

It is our Palestinian people’s Resistance that has fractured the impunity of the Zionist regime before the eyes of the world, and which continues to resist the genocide and all of its accomplices and enablers. All those responsible for the ongoing genocide – which has persisted not for 7 months but for over 76 years and indeed over 100 years – will be held accountable by our people and by the Arab and regional resistance, and all of the revolutionary forces, movements and peoples of the world. We do not trust in the institutions of the imperialist order; we know that justice, and the dismantling of the Zionist regime, will be obtained by the people in the inevitable forthcoming victory.