Day after backing ICC, France says there’s no comparison between Israel and Hamas
‘These simultaneous requests for arrest warrants should not create an equivalence,’ French FM says; Israel’s Katz urges him to clearly call ICC prosecutor’s move unacceptable
A day after his ministry issued a statement of support for the International Criminal Court when its prosecutor announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and three Hamas leaders, French Foreign Minister Stephane Séjourné told parliament on Tuesday, “These simultaneous requests for arrest warrants should not create an equivalence between Hamas and Israel.”
In the Monday night statement released by its foreign ministry, France said it “supports the International Criminal Court, its independence and the fight against impunity in every situation” after ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced he was requesting arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant as well as Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and Muhammad Deif.
Acknowledging that Hamas’s actions during its October 7 on Israel were antisemitic, the Monday statement said it would be up to the ICC’s preliminary chamber to rule on the Israeli arrest warrants based on evidence presented by Khan. “For many months now, France has been warning about the imperative of strict compliance with international humanitarian law and particularly the unacceptable nature of the civilian losses in the Gaza Strip, and insufficient humanitarian access,” it said.
Changing tone on Tuesday, Séjourné stressed that Hamas is “a terrorist group that celebrated the October 7 attacks” in which it killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and took another 252 hostages.
Israel, by contrast, is “a democratic state that must respect international law in the conduct of a war that it did not itself start,” Séjourné noted.
Israel’s Foreign Minister, Israel Katz, speaking in Paris at an event attended by Séjourné, urged him “to announce loud and clear that the decision of the Chief Prosecutor is unacceptable to you and the French government – regardless of the authority of the court.”
“This is what our friends around the world did, and this is what I expect from our friend, the French government,” Katz said, referring to denunciations of the prosecutor’s move by US President Joe Biden among others.
Katz was speaking at an event marking 75 years of relations between Israel and France.
Earlier Tuesday, an unnamed French diplomat told Ynet that France was not expressing automatic support for the arrest warrants.
“We differentiate between Hamas leaders and Israeli leaders,” the diplomat said. “We try not to pass moral judgment but focus on facts that clearly show that there is no comparison between Hamas’s crimes, which we defined as antisemitic, and what is being done in Gaza.”
