Israel strikes Gaza in response to rocket fire, no injuries

JNS.org – Avera Mengistu, the 28-year-old Israeli of Ethiopian descent who has been missing since he crossed the border into Gaza last September, is an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier who was taken captive during Operation Protective Edge and not a mentally unstable civilian as Israel claims, Hamas official Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook told Al Jazeera on Thursday.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon echoed Netanyahu, saying, “It’s not clear why the court insists on spending its resources needlessly dealing with cynical, politically motivated complaints, instead of dealing with the things for which it was founded to address – investigating mass atrocities”. One of the boats targeted by the Israeli raid was registered in Comoros, an Island in the Indian Ocean.

But under the Rome Statute – the treaty which established the ICC and gives the court the authority to investigate and prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity – the incident was not of “sufficient gravity”, Bensouda found.

The two judges in the majority were presiding Judge Joyce Aluoch of Kenya and Judge Cuno Tarfusser of Italy.

Bensouda must now review her decision “as soon as possible”.

First, he said, the majority had not been sufficiently deferential to Bensouda’s wide discretion as prosecutor to decide when to open and close investigations.

Crucially, Kovacs added that even if the prosecutor had made a mistake in defining the case as not grave enough, he wrote that the IDF had issued warnings to the ship to turn around and acted in the face of “violent resistance” from passengers.

The raid had strained relations between Israel and Turkey, both non-member of the criminal court, for a long time before Tel Aviv signed a compensation deal with Ankara. Bensouda decided not to proceed with a full investigation in November 2014.

“The Prosecutor committed material errors in her determination of the gravity of the potential case(s)”, the judges said.

Israel waged its latest war on the Gaza Strip in early July 2014.