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Sir Keir Starmer’s government has signalled it would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he travelled to the UK, a day after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the Israeli prime minister “for crimes against humanity and war crimes”.
Asked whether Britain would comply with the arrest warrant, a spokesperson for Starmer said the government would “always comply with its legal obligations as set out by domestic law, and indeed international law”.
However, they refused to be drawn on any specific “hypotheticals”.
The UK statement came as Germany indicated it would not enforce the warrant, the first such move by the ICC for the arrest of a western-backed leader.
The warrant means the ICC’s 124 member states — which include most European and Latin American countries, and many in Africa and Asia — would be obliged to arrest Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant if they entered their territory.
But the court itself has no means of enforcing the warrants, so it depends on the member states to do so.
Netanyahu’s office has branded the warrants “antisemitic” and called the ICC “a biased and discriminatory political body”.
Starmer’s spokesperson added that the UK has never before had to comply with an ICC arrest warrant because the country has not knowingly been visited by someone who had been served with one.
Under 2001 UK legislation, the foreign secretary is required to forward ICC arrest warrants to the British legal authorities, who are in turn obliged to act if they are “satisfied that the warrant appears to have been issued by the ICC”.
Earlier on Friday, home secretary Yvette Cooper refused to say whether the government would enforce the ICC’s warrant if Netanyahu travelled to the UK.
“There are proper processes that need to be followed,” she told Sky News, adding that it would not be appropriate for her “to comment on individual cases in a speculative way”.
States including Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Ireland said this week they would meet their ICC commitments. By contrast, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán invited Netanyahu to visit his country.
The US is not a member of the ICC and outgoing president Joe Biden has called the arrest warrant “outrageous”.
Germany, where politicians across the political spectrum argue that they have a responsibility to support Israel as part of the country’s atonement for the Holocaust, has also suggested it would not comply with the warrant.
“I find it hard to imagine that we would make arrests on this basis,” said government spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit.
Hebestreit said that while Germany’s history made it a champion of the ICC, “we have a unique relationship and a great responsibility towards Israel”.
Issuing Thursday’s warrant, the court said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Netanyahu and Gallant bore criminal responsibility for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”.
The ICC also issued a warrant for Hamas leader Mohammed Deif for crimes against humanity and war crimes over the group’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza. Israel said in August it had killed Deif in an air strike in Gaza a month earlier.
