Palestinian ICC membership will backfire: Israeli official

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Tzachi Hanegbi has warned the Palestinian Authority (PA) against applying for membership in the International Criminal Court (ICC) after the UN Security Council rejected a Palestinian bid to achieve statehood.

“Palestinian ICC membership would backfire, as it would allow Israel to sue [the PA] for its involvement in terrorism,” Hanegbi was quoted as saying by Israel’s public radio.

The New York-based Security Council on Tuesday rejected a draft resolution calling for an end of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land within three years.

The motion, submitted on Monday by Jordan after having been agreed upon by Arab states, failed to win the minimum nine votes from the 15-member council, with both the U.S. and Australia voting against the proposal.

The U.K., Nigeria, Rwanda, South Korea and Lithuania all abstained from the vote, while Jordan, France, Russia, China, Argentina, Chad, Chile and Luxembourg voted in favor.

The draft resolution had set the end of 2017 as the deadline for Israel to fully withdraw from occupied territories and to declare East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas had earlier threatened to sever “all forms of coordination” with Israel and apply for membership in the ICC if the Security Council failed to adopt the resolution.

Several Palestinian factions, including the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip, had called on Abbas to sign the ICC’s Rome Statute, which would allow the PA to sue Israel for war crimes.

Israel has strongly criticized a recent reconciliation deal between Abbas’ Ramallah-based Fatah movement and Hamas, the latter of which is considered a “terrorist group” by Israel and the U.S.

Direct, U.S.-brokered Palestinian-Israeli talks ground to a halt in April after Israel refused to release a group of Palestinian prisoners despite earlier pledges to do so.

The roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict date back to 1917, when the British government, in the now-famous “Balfour Declaration,” called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East War.

It later annexed the holy city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the self-proclaimed Jewish state in a move never recognized by the international community.

Palestinians want a state of their own in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, with East Jerusalem – currently occupied by Israel – as its capital.