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The Office of Argentine President Javier Milei issued a statement announcing its “categorical rejection” of the International Criminal Court (ICC) choosing to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Milei’s office accused the ICC of “criminalizing the legitimate right of a nation to self-defense” and supported Israeli’s right to protect “the population of their country from extermination.”

“Israel faces a brutal aggression, an inhuman seizure of hostages, and the indiscriminate launch of attacks against its population,” the president’s statement declared. “Criminalizing the legitimate defense of a nation while these atrocities are omitted is an act that distorts the spirit of international justice.”

Milei’s office accused the ICC of being “influenced by politics” and noted that the ICC prosecutor who requested the arrest warrants, Karim Khan, “still owes [the public] a resolution against communist dictator Nicolás Maduro for his crimes against humanity.” The ICC launched a formal investigation into Maduro’s rampant human rights crimes against his own people in 2021 but announced that Maduro’s socialist regime would play a major role in investigating itself, outraging human rights activists.

“Argentina expresses solidarity with Israel, reaffirms its right to protect its people, and demands the immediate liberation of all the hostages,” the statement concluded.

The ICC is a unique international platform that prosecutes individuals only on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It has no enforcement mechanism and only states that have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, which created the court, have an international legal obligation to obey it. Argentina is a signatory to the Rome Statute, while Israel has signed the statute but not ratified it, so it has no obligation to the court.

As a signatory, Argentina in theory has an obligation to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they visit the country, an obligation Milei has rejected and would likely ignore.

ICC prosecutor Khan requested that the court issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant – as well as three leaders of the Hamas genocidal terrorist gang, Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, and Mohammed Diab – in May. Khan accused the Israeli leaders of “war crimes” and three kinds of “crimes against humanity”: “starvation, extermination, and persecution.”

The warrant requests stem from the horrifying events of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and conducted an unprecedented slaughter of an estimated 1,200 people, many killed in door-to-door raids on residential communities. Survivors recounted large numbers of incidents of gang rape, torture, and the torture and killing of children, including babies. The terrorists also abducted more than 200 people, many of them Argentine-Israelis, of which about 100 are believed to remain in captivity to this day.

Khan listed these crimes as the reasons for requesting warrants for the Hamas chiefs but equated those actions to the self-defense operations by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the immediate aftermath of the attack. The IDF invaded Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, and sought to eliminate terrorist infrastructure, weapons stockpiles, and cells of trained terrorists who could repeat the atrocities of the October 7 attack. Khan accused Netanyahu of deliberately starving and persecuting Gazan civilians, an accusation Jerusalem has energetically denied.

The ICC granted all warrants requested related to the October 7 attack. Haniyeh and Sinwar died before the ICC decision this week.

Netanyahu’s office issued a blistering statement condemning the issuance of the warrant, calling the move “antisemitic” and supportive of Hamas.

“Israel utterly rejects the false and absurd charges of the International Criminal Court, a biased and discriminatory political body,” the statement read. “No war is more just than the war Israel has been waging in Gaza since October 7th 2023, when the Hamas terrorist organization launched a murderous assault and perpetrated the largest massacre against the Jewish People since the Holocaust.”

Netanyahu promised he would “not give in to pressure” and “continue to pursue all the objectives that Israel set out to achieve in its just war against Hamas and the Iranian axis of terror.”

In Argentina, Milei followed up his defense of the Israeli government with the launch of a joint counterterrorism initiative with Israel.

“We are advancing a historic memorandum with the Israeli government, a bilateral alliance between two brotherly nations, in defense of liberty and democracy [and] in combat with terrorism and dictatorships,” Milei proclaimed. “It is our wish that this alliance between Argentina and Israel become a model for other nations of the free world to also choose life and liberty, firmly and openly condemning terrorism.”

Argentina has a large Jewish population and has traditionally maintained friendly relations with Israel, which has made it a target for international radical Islamic terrorism. It was the target of the deadliest terrorist attack on the Western Hemisphere prior to 2001: the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) headquarters, killing 85 people. Decades of investigations have revealed that the Iranian government and its proxy terrorist organization Hezbollah were responsible for the attack. In April, an Argentine court formally declared Iran and Hezbollah guilty of the attack and a similar bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992.

Milei visited Israel for the first time in February, honoring the victims of the October 7 attacks with stops in some of the communities most devastated by the massacre.

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