International personalities can make or break policies. Take the example of the International Criminal Court (ICC) where Briton Karim Khan has sidelined investigations of Israeli occupation policies in Palestine. Probes are opposed by the US and its ally Israel which, among others have not submitted to ICC jurisdiction. Both reject trials for their citizens outside their countries. While the US has backed ICC work elsewhere, notably in Africa, Washington has threatened the court if it takes up breaches of international law by US citizens while living, serving, and working abroad. In the US view, ICC investigations targeting the US and Israel are “illegitimate” as both claim they investigate crimes by their citizens to ICC standards. This claim is absurd. Neither does.

Since war erupted in Ukraine in February 2022, Khan, the third chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), made four visits to that country, initiated investigations into the conduct of the conflict by Russia, and applied for arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir and politician Maria Lvova-Belova. They are charged with involvement in the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia. Neither Russia nor Ukraine accepts the court’s jurisdiction. Since the war began, however, Ukraine has used a procedure for non-member states to seek ICC investigations of international crimes committed on their territory.

Khan has also reached an agreement with the Ukraine government to establish an ICC office in that country. Following his March visit to Kyiv, he stated, “Since taking up my position as Prosecutor, I have repeatedly said that children must no longer be the forgotten victims of conflict.”

During his stay he visited a care home for children not far from the front lines and found it empty “as a result of [the] alleged deportation” of the inhabitants to Russia. He rightly argued, “Children cannot be treated as the spoils of war.”

Khan is a British barrister of Indo-Pakistani background who has an impressive record in prosecuting war criminals and was nominated by Britain, which has accepted ICC jurisdiction. He has set aside investigations into alleged crimes by the Taliban and Daesh in Afghanistan as well as the US and its allies since 2003, citing financial pressures. He cites lack of money although there is no lack of money for Ukraine.

In this key post Khan follows Argentinian Luis Moreno Ocampo and Gambian Fatu Bensouda, both of whom engaged with Palestine. While Ocampo was in office, the ICC accepted that past events in Israeli-occupied Palestine should be investigated. In 2015, when Bensouda was in charge, Palestine was admitted as a “state party” to the Rome Statute which established the ICC. In 2019, investigations were begun into Israel’s violations of international law and in 2020 the court set the procedure for dealing with the case and called for submissions. Ocampo was condemned by Israel and its friends and The Trump administration barred Bensouda from entering the US.

Two years after taking up his ICC appointment, Khan not visited Palestine or pursued the case raised by Palestine in the ICC. Instead, he announced at the end of last year that he would make it a “goal” to visit Palestine this year. To do so, he will have to get Israel’s permission which opposes any ICC investigation into its occupation of Palestine. So far, he has not asked Israel to allow him into Palestine as Israel controls entry to East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

Writing on the Electronic Intifada website, Maureen Clare Murphy, observed, “While the situation on the ground rapidly deteriorates, the Palestine investigation appears to be growing ever colder. Powerful states are either ambivalent or openly hostile towards the probe, while lavishing support for the ICC’s newly opened investigation in Ukraine. [Last year was] the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since at least 2005 and there is no end in sight for Israel’s sociocidal siege on Gaza. The outlook for 2023 doesn’t look great, to say the least.”She demanded, “How bad do things have to get before Karim Khan.. treats the Palestine investigation with the urgency it so clearly requires?”

She revealed that 200 organisations based in Palestine and internationally “are pressing Khan to not only investigate Israeli crimes, but to deter them by warning Israel of their illegality. “Bensouda.. issued a handful of such warnings, preventing at least one war crime during her tenure.”Murphy said one of these warnings halted the Israeli demolition of Khan-al-Ahmar, a Bedouin hamlet in the West Bank which has gained fame due to its handsome school which was built with plastered and brightly painted cast off vehicle tyres.

Although several Palestinian human rights organisations protesting Khan’s refusal to engage have been raided by Israeli forces and banned because they have provided evidence of Israeli war crimes to the ICC, Khan has remained silent. While he regards Ukrainian children taken to Russia as “spoils of war,” he says and does nothing about Palestinian children becoming “victims of Israel’s occupation.”

This year Israel has already killed at least 24 Palestinian children and 51 adults. Last year 56 children were killed as well as 174 adults; 150 children were imprisoned; seven of whom were held under indefinite administrative detention. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that by mid-2023 there should be 2.9 million children under 18 years-0f-age in the occupied Palestinian territories, about 44 per cent of the population.

West Bank Palestinian children suffer constant trauma from fear of nightly Israeli army raids on their communities and homes. Intensive raids began more than a year ago under the centre-right government and have been accelerated since the advent of the extreme right regime under Benyamin Netanyahu. Children in Gaza have suffered 17 years of psychological damage due to Israel’s air, land, and sea siege and blockade and attacks on the narrow coastal strip where they are forever imprisoned.

Not satisfied with traumatising Palestinian children, Israel also seeks to deprive them of their right to education which violates international law. In a village near Bethlehem in early May Israeli troops not only demolished an elementary school serving 60 pupils but also took what was left away. This action elicited condemnation from the European Union which had funded the school, a successor to an earlier school which was demolished in 2018. While dozens of Palestinian schools are threatened with demolition, Khan does nothing. He neither visits Palestine nor issues warnings as his predecessor did.

Photo: TNS