The International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan was warned in May that if arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant were not withdrawn, he and the ICC would be “destroyed”, Middle East Eye reports.
The warning was delivered to British national Khan by Nicholas Kaufman, a British-Israeli defence lawyer at the court who told Khan he had spoken to Netanyahu’s legal advisor and, according to a note of the meeting lodged on file at the ICC and seen by Middle East Eye, was “authorised” to make him a proposal that would allow Khan to “climb down the tree”.
He told Khan to apply to the court to reclassify the warrants and underlying information as “confidential”.
This, it was suggested, would allow Israel to access the details of the allegations, which it could not do at the time, and challenge them in private — without the outcome being made public.
But Kaufman warned that if it emerged the chief prosecutor was applying for more arrest warrants, for far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich over their promotion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, then “all options would be off the table”.
Kaufman told Khan: “They will destroy you and they will destroy the court.”
Khan and his wife, who also attended the meeting, both understood this to be a threat, according to the note of the meeting seen by MEE.
Kaufman told MEE: “I do not deny that I told Khan that he should be looking for a way to extricate himself from his errors. I am not authorised to make any proposals on behalf of the Israeli government, nor did I.”
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