Palestinian rights groups submit legal notice to ICC about Israel

Palestinian rights groups announced on Wednesday that they have submitted a legal notice to the International Criminal Court with regard to Israeli violations, including settlements in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem, Shehab.ps has reported.

The details were revealed in a press conference by the Head of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Al-Sourani. Lawyer Sha’wan Jabareen, he explained, has travelled to the ICC in The Hague in order to submit the legal notice by hand. “A meeting is being held with the head of the first investigation committee for the ICC and his assistants in order to receive the 700-page legal notice.”

Al-Sourani said that the legal notice included all the necessary evidence of rights abuses by hundreds of Israeli officials. “The policy of moving Israeli settlers to the occupied Palestinian land is a war crime,” he pointed out. “Expropriation of wide swathes of lands, destroying properties of the Palestinians and damaging their social connection are also war crimes.”

Israel, he told journalists, is trying to impose facts on the ground by moving settlers to the occupied Palestinian lands. “We will not surrender to the outcome of this policy; hence, we are moving legally, humanely and morally to stop this crime.”

This is the fourth legal notice that the rights groups have submitted to the ICC about Israeli crimes against the Palestinians. The first followed the Israeli military offensive against the Gaza Strip in 2014; the second covered the Israeli siege on Gaza; and the third was specifically about the Israeli army’s crimes in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah during the 2014 offensive.

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