Netanyahu is on a mission to seize the Middle East. Will anyone stop him?

Israeli troops deploy near the Gaza border on 1 August 2025

… arrest warrants against two other ministers in the Israeli cabinet,

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich,

were lying on the desks of two deputy prosecutors, gathering dust.

They are fully prepared, according to our sources,

and if served, would represent the first time that the crime of apartheid was prosecuted at the ICC.

When South Africa brought the charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the court gave Israel nine months to present its rebuttal. That expired at the end of July.

The panel of 17 judges accepted Israel’s argument that it needed more time to prepare its case because of “evidentiary issues” in South Africa’s case. Accordingly, Israel’s impunity before the ICJ was extended by another six months. It is now thought that the ICJ will not rule on the issue before 2027 at the earliest.

In those nine months, more than 250 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, have died of starvation created expressly as a weapon of war by Israel’s cabinet. The carnage has continued unabated. Thousands more civilians have been killed by bombings, and tens of thousands are set to die if Israeli forces retake Gaza City.

A leak of the minutes of a cabinet meeting on 1 March, published recently by Channel 13, revealed how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who now heads Israel’s negotiating team, argued successfully – against the advice of top Israeli military and security officials – that Israel should starve Gaza into submission.

Netanyahu decided to break the ceasefire that was at the time functioning, and to cut off all aid to Gaza to “force Hamas to surrender”, the leak noted.

Last week, however, Netanyahu claimed none of this has happened. The policy of starvation that he voted on at that cabinet meeting in March was a fiction, part of a mass vilification of Jews. Days later, the Israeli army joined in the campaign of denial, claiming there were no signs of widespread malnutrition in Gaza.

In other words, Unicef, the World Food Programme, and all the other experts who say that a famine is playing out in Gaza, are lying. The images of children reduced to skin and bones are fake. It’s all part of a “blood libel” against Jews.

Perverting the course of justice

If the ICJ remains paralysed, the same applies to its sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC). As Middle East Eye has reported in some detail, the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, have been effectively neutralised.

This was by means of an organised and orchestrated campaign of vilification that forced the British chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, to take leave, pending the outcome of an external investigation into accusations of sexual assault – allegations Khan vigorously denies.

On Friday, MEE reported that arrest warrants against two other ministers in the Israeli cabinet, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, were lying on the desks of two deputy prosecutors gathering dust. They are fully prepared, according to our sources, and if served, would represent the first time that the crime of apartheid was prosecuted at the ICC.

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