CAIRO: The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor warned Sunday that blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza could constitute a crime.
“Impeding relief supplies as provided by the Geneva Conventions may constitute a crime within the court jurisdiction,” Karim Khan told reporters in Cairo.
He was speaking after a visit to Egypt’s Rafah crossing, where he said trucks full of desperately needed goods remained stuck and unable to cross into Gaza.
“I saw trucks full of goods, full of humanitarian assistance stuck where nobody needs them, stuck in Egypt, stuck at Rafah,” he said.
“These supplies must get to the civilians of Gaza without delay.”
Rafah is the only entry point through which international aid is currently able to trickle into the Hamas-run Palestinian territory, which is facing a near-total siege and relentless Israeli bombardment.
Israel imposed the siege and unleashed its massive bombing campaign after Hamas gunmen stormed across the border on October 7, killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, and seizing 230 hostages, according to Israeli officials.
Israel’s strikes have since then killed more than 8,000 people, half of them children, the Hamas-controlled health ministry in the territory said.
Since limited aid deliveries resumed through the Rafah crossing on October 21, a total of 117 trucks have entered.
Prior to the siege, some 500 trucks carrying aid and other goods entered Gaza every day.
Khan said he wanted “to underline clearly to Israel that there must be discernible efforts without further delay to make sure civilians (in Gaza) receive basic food, medicines.”
On Sunday the United Nations warned it feared a breakdown of public order after looting at food aid centers in Gaza run by its agency for Palestinian refugees, the UNRWA.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said the situation was “growing more desperate by the hour” as casualty numbers increase and essential supplies of food, water, medicine and shelter dwindle.
Khan said his office had an ongoing investigation into “any crimes committed on the territory of Palestine and any crimes committed, whether it’s by Israel and Palestine or whether it’s acts committed on the territory of Palestine or from Palestine into Israel.”
“This includes current events in Gaza and also current events in the West Bank,” Khan said.
He said he was “very concerned also by the spike of the number of reported incidents of attack by settlers against Palestinian civilians” in the territory Israel has occupied since 1967.
Khan also stressed that hostage-taking was a breach of the Geneva Conventions.
“I call for the immediate release of all hostages taken from Israel and for their safe return to their families,” he said.
The British lawyer said “Israel has clear obligations in relation to its war with Hamas, not just moral obligations but legal obligations” to comply with the laws of conflict.
“These principles equally apply to Hamas in relation to firing indiscriminate rockets into Israel,” he said.
Set up in 2002, the ICC is the only global independent tribunal to probe the world’s worst crimes including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Palestinians signed up to the court’s founding Rome Statute in 2015.
Israel, which is not a signatory to the ICC, has refused to cooperate with the probe or recognize its jurisdiction.
Preventing aid getting to Gaza could be ‘a crime’: ICC prosecutor
https://arab.news/pwnpg
Preventing aid getting to Gaza could be ‘a crime’: ICC prosecutor
- Karim Khan: ‘These supplies must get to the civilians of Gaza without delay’
- Egypt’s Rafah crossing only entry point through which international aid trickles in
Landmine explosion in Sudan kills 9, including 3 children
- “Nine people, three of them children, were killed by a mine explosion while they were in a tuk-tuk,” a medical source at Al-Abbasiya hospital said
KHARTOUM: A land mine explosion killed nine people in Sudan on Sunday, including three children, as they were riding in an auto-rickshaw along a road in the frontline region of Kordofan, a medical source told AFP.
The war between the regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which began in April 2023, has left Sudan strewn with mines and unexploded ordnance, though the explosive that caused Sunday’s deaths could also have dated back to previous rebellions that have shaken South Kordofan state since 2011.
“Nine people, three of them children, were killed by a mine explosion while they were in a tuk-tuk,” a medical source at Al-Abbasiya hospital said.
The vehicle was reduced to “a metal carcass,” witness Abdelbagi Issa told AFP by phone.
“We were walking behind the tuk-tuk along the road to the market when we heard the sound of an explosion,” he said. “People fell to the ground and the tuk-tuk was destroyed.”
Kordofan has become the center of fighting in the nearly three-year war ever since the RSF forced the army out of its last foothold in the neighboring Darfur region late last year.
Since it broke out, Sudan’s civil war has killed tens of thousands of people and forced 11 million to flee their homes, triggering a dire humanitarian crisis.
It has also effectively split the country in two, with the army holding the north, center and east while the RSF and its allies control the west and parts of the south.
