Israel-Gaza war live: France backs ICC after prosecutor seeks arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Hamas leaders

In today’s First Edition newsletter, my colleague Archie Bland has spoken to Mohammad Ali Shabani, editor of Amwaj.media, a news website covering Iran, about what the future holds there after the unexpected death of president Ebrahim Raisi at the weekend:

Ebrahim Raisi was not a beloved figure in Iran – but that doesn’t mean his critics will necessarily be feeling optimistic today. “You will find as many different feelings about his death as there are Iranians,” Mohammad Ali Shabani said. “But within my own networks, there’s maybe a mix of people who don’t perceive him as having been influential, meaning that there won’t be a massive upheaval – but also an underlying nervousness about what’s next.”

“Raisi was a conservative who spent much of his career in the judiciary and oversaw mass executions,” Shabani said. “You are not talking about a liberal democrat.”

“Since 2021, every branch of the government has been in the hands of the conservatives,” he said. “That has not been good for supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In the past, when the executive branch was dominated by non-conservatives, he was able to be flexible about policy – and blame the president if something goes wrong. Now he is painted into a corner, because his own cronies are in charge everywhere – so he has much less flexibility to try different approaches.”

That is why there is now a “golden opportunity” for opening up political space – “to reverse course without losing face, and get voters to engage with the system again, because of the hand fate has dealt you”.

You can read more here: Tuesday briefing – What the death of Ebrahim Raisi means for Iran’s political future

Yemen’s Houthis downed a US MQ-9 drone over al-Bayda province in southern Yemen near the Gulf of Aden, the Iran-aligned group’s military spokesperson Yahya Saree said in a televised statement on Tuesday, Reuters reports.

Palestinian sources are reporting that five people have been killed during an Israeli raid in the occupied-West Bank city of Jenin.

The Wafa news agency reports “among the slain civilians was the surgical specialist at Jenin hospital, Aseed Jabareen, who was targeted in the vicinity of the hospital, a teacher who was on duty in a school, and a student on his way back to his home.”

Reuters reports the Israeli army said it was operating against militants and several Palestinian gunmen were shot.

In a recent update on the situation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (OCHA) recorded that since 7 October, 480 Palestinians have been killed, including 116 children by either Israeli security forces or Israeli settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel has claimed it killed a senior Hezbollah commander in an attack near Tyre in Lebanon.

In a statement posted to the IDF’s official Telegram channel, Israel claimed Qassem Saqlawi, who it described as “the commander of the rocket and missile array in Hezbollah’s coastal sector” was the target of a an Israeli airstrike.

It said he was “responsible for planning and executing numerous rocket attacks against the Israeli home front.”

The claims have not been independently verified.

In the message, Israel’s military also reported a number of launches overnight into Israel from the direction of Lebanon, which it said “fell in open terrain”.

Welcome to our latest live blog on the Israel-Gaza war and the wider Middle East crisis. I am Martin Belam and I will be with you for the next while.

France says it supports the independence of the international criminal court (ICC), after its prosecutor requested arrest warrants for leaders from Israel, including prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and those from Hamas.

In a statement released late on Monday the foreign ministry said “France supports the international criminal court, its independence, and the fight against impunity in all situations,” reports Agence France-Presse.

The ministry “condemned the antisemitic massacres perpetrated by Hamas” during the group’s attack on Israel on 7 October, which was “accompanied by acts of torture and sexual violence”.

It also said it had warned Israel “of the need for strict compliance with international humanitarian law, and in particular of the unacceptable level of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip and inadequate humanitarian access”.

The international criminal court’s prosecutor Karim Khan said on Monday he had applied for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza. Khan also said leaders of Palestinian militant group Hamas, including Qatar-based Ismail Haniyeh and Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, “bear criminal responsibility” for actions committed during the 7 October attack.

More on that in a moment but first, here’s a summary of the latest developments:

• Joe Biden has attacked as “outrageous” an application by the international criminal court for warrants seeking the arrest of Israeli officials. “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” Biden said in the statement. “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas. We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

• The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court said he is seeking arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant. Netanyahu and Gallant are accused of extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberately targeting civilians. Hamas leaders and officials Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh were named as being wanted for crimes of extermination, murder, hostage taking, rape, sexual assault and torture.

• Senior figures in the Israeli government have reacted angrily to the announcement which Israel’s foreign minister Israel Katz said was “scandalous” and tantamount to attacking the victims of 7 October. Finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the decision would be “the last nail in the dismantling of this political and antisemitic court,” adding that “arrest warrants [for Netanyahu and Gallant] are the arrest warrants for all of us”. President Isaac Herzog said it was “one-sided” and in “bad faith”, and that Israel “expects all leaders in the free world to condemn outright this step and firmly reject it.”

• The move has also been condemned by senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhuri, who said the decision “equates the victim with the executioner” and encourages Israel to continue its “war of extermination” in Gaza. Wasel Abu Youssef of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said there was confusion over who was the victim, and that “The Palestinian people have the right to defend themselves. The ICC is required to issue arrest warrants against Israeli officials who are pursuing crimes of genocide in the Gaza Strip.”

• UN officials warned Monday that food and medicine for Palestinians in Gaza are piling up in Egypt because the Rafah crossing remains closed and there has been no aid delivered to a UN warehouse from the US-built pier for two days, according to Reuters. Senior UN aid official Edem Wosornu said there were insufficient supplies and fuel to provide any meaningful level of support to the people of Gaza. “We are running out of words to describe what is happening in Gaza. We have described it as a catastrophe, a nightmare, as hell on earth. It is all of these, and worse,” she said.

• An Australian doctor trapped inside one of Gaza’s few remaining functioning hospitals has urged the Australian government to do more to get him and his colleagues out and additional medical aid in. Sydney-based Dr Modher Albeiruti is among 16 international doctors and medical workers who have been stranded inside the European hospital in Khan Younis since Israel took control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing this month.

• Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has announced a five-day public mourning period after the deaths of president Ebrahim Raisi, foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other passengers in a helicopter crash on Sunday. The bodies were recovered from a mountain crash site on Monday morning.