A Giant Step Towards Declaring American Soldiers War Criminals

David French
American Center for Law and Justice
4/2/2015

Yesterday, the International Criminal Court “welcomed” Palestine as a “State Party” to the Rome Statute, the international treaty governing the ICC. Most of the coverage focused on the implications for Israel, as the PA has declared its intentions to file complaints against Israel for its conduct in the 2014 Gaza conflict. A non-ideological ICC would laugh these claims out of court on a number of grounds — including that Israel goes far beyond the historic requirements of the Law of Armed Conflict in its concern for minimizing civilian casualties and because it has its own robust means of investigating and punishing alleged war crimes. A non-ideological ICC would focus on Hamas’s consistent intentional war crimes, including deliberately targeting civilians, its use of civilians and civilian buildings to shield its own military activities, and its refusal to fight in uniforms or other distinctive insignia to help distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. The list could go on. For Hamas, war crimes represent the totality of their military strategy.

But it would be a profound mistake for Americans (or the Obama administration and successor administrations) to believe that ICC proceedings are relevant only to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict…

 

 

The article continues at ACLJ.org

 

 

 

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