Israeli minister says ICC prosecutor requested his arrest

According to information from the EFE agency, Smotrich did not give further details about the request, which had been anticipated last Sunday (17) by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, stating that it was a petition for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, occupied by Israel.

In 2024, the ICC had already issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the war in the Gaza Strip.

“Last night I was informed that the prosecutor of the anti-Semitic court in The Hague had filed a request for an international arrest warrant against me,” Smotrich said this Tuesday, in a statement posted on his social media.

“The clumsy attempt to impose on us a policy of suicide in matters of security through sanctions and an army of prisons will not succeed,” added the minister, who said that Israel will not accept “hypocritical dictates from partial bodies that repeatedly oppose the State of Israel, our biblical, historical and legal rights in our homeland.”

“This is our country and we will treat it as such. Over the past three and a half years, we have finally achieved this. I am proud to lead this transcendent change,” he added.

Following information published on Sunday by Haaretz, which cited a diplomatic source, the ICC denied having issued new arrest warrants against Israeli officials as part of its investigation into alleged crimes committed in the Palestinian territories.

In June last year, the governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway announced that Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, were banned from entering those countries and had their assets in those nations blocked.

At the time, they were accused of inciting “extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights” in the West Bank.