(No) Sympathy for the Devil (s) - Part I

Why the ICC is right to indict these two criminals, why Amnesty International is right to back the ICC, and why America needs to stop whining about it.

Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, and Yahya Sinwar, now leader of HAMAS, who designed and carried out the October 7 raid against Israel that killed more than a 1,200 people, with more than 250 carried off as hostages.

There they are. Both these men are accused by the International Criminal Court of crimes against humanity—and both deserve it. There are several others, Israeli and Palestinian, who were indicted in May by the British barrister Karim A. A. Khan, who is the chief prosecutor of the ICC. One of the indicted was just taken out on Iranian soil.

Assassinated: HAMAS political leader Ismail Haniyeh. Net worth: $4 Billion.

Ismail Haniyeh in 2020. Wikimedia Commons.

Gee, how did the fellow so rich? We all thought Gaza and the Palestinian Territories are dirt poor. Well, they are.

And now the Ayatollah Khomenei, arguably the least spiritual male supremacist on this planet, is threatening an attack on Israel within days. We are now at a dictionary definition of the term crisis.

So, who was Ismail Haniyeh?

Haniyeh, was born in Al-Shāṭiʾrefugee camp, Gaza Strip, most likely in 1962. He was educated in U.N. schools before attending the Islamic University of Gaza where he became leader of an Islamist organization with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. He served as prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2006–07 after Hamas won a majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. After interfactional fighting with rival Fatah led to the dissolution of the government and the establishment of an autonomous Hamas-led administration in the Gaza Strip, Haniyeh served as the leader of the de facto government from 2007–14. In 2017 he became Hamas’s political bureau chief.

To say Haniyeh made out like a bandit is an understatement. For a boy born in a refugee camp, his rise to billionaire playboy—who lived not in Gaza but in million-dollar high rises in Qatar and Turkey—was spectacular. It is said that he and his family owned at least 20% of all Gaza land and real estate. He was also able to personally “tax” the movement of goods across large parts of Gaza. And, like most other top HAMAS leaders, he exploited his position to steal millions of cash and goods from international aid meant for the Palestinian people. Translation: he stole food, medicine, clothing, and other essential articles sent to the Palestinian people by the U.N., the United States, and charities worldwide and SOLD them for a PROFIT for his own PERSONAL GAIN. And yes, a majority of Palestinians are desperately poor.

All this money-making and graft came at a price: more than 60 members of Haniyeh’s family were assassinated by Israel, some in a strike on the family home in Gaza and some when an Israeli missile hit the family car. These included three of his sons.

Although we can’t attribute to Haniyeh personally with the murders carried out by HAMAS in terrorist attacks inside Israel—the restaurant bombings, the bus bombings, the rocket attacks and all the others as well as all who died in the October 7th massacres—they would not have occurred without his approval. HAMAS’s charter calls for the complete removal of all Jews “from the river to the sea” (from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean) and the complete replacement of Israel with a Muslim Islamic Palestinian state. That makes him just as responsible as the bloodiest man in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the military leader of HAMAS.

On 31 July, 2024, Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran while attending the inauguration of newly elected president Masoud Pezeshkian, the reformist elected over the profound objections of the religious conservatives, the man who is the best chance Iran’s had since the revolution of 1978-79 to loosen the grip of the intensely anti-woman, anti-Israel, anti-human regime.

Haniyeh and one of his bodyguards were killed, Hamas said, by a “Zionist” airstrike on a residence. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps echoed this report. Both lied. Haniyeh was assassinated using a remotely detonated explosive device hidden in his guesthouse room two months earlier, a device triggered once he was confirmed to be inside.

HAMAS filled the void left by Haniyeh’s death with the very man who planned and carried out the massacre of roughly 1,200 people.

Yahya Sinwar, Planner and Executor of the October 7 Attacks

Sinwar, as well as all the others in HAMAS, routinely use heavily-indoctrinated children as poster children. They also use them as human shields in kindergartens and grammar schools when they pick gunfights with the IDF.

Yahya Sinwar was born October 29th, 1962 in the densely packed, horrifically poverty-stricken Khan Younis refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Like Haniyeh, his education, his food, and his medicine were largely gifted by the UNRWA. He became head of affairs in the Gaza Strip in 2017 and the de facto leader after Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran. He became head of its political bureau in August 2024.

Sinwar was an early architect of Hamas’s armed wing and he is considered the mastermind behind the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, the deadliest day for Israel since its independence. According to Britannica:

In 1985, prior to the formation of Hamas, Sinwar helped organize al-Majd (Arabic: “Glory”; an acronym for Munaẓẓamat al-Jihād wa al-Daʿwah, “Organization for Jihad and Daʿwah [promotion of Islamic ideals]”).

Al-Majd was a network of Islamist youths who tasked themselves with exposing the growing number of Palestinian informants who had been recruited by Israel in recent years. When Hamas was formed in 1987, al-Majd was folded into its security cadre. In 1988 the network was found to possess weapons, and Sinwar was detained by Israel for several weeks.

The following year, he was convicted for the murder of Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel and was sentenced to four life sentences in prison.

So, how did a criminal sentenced to four life terms go free? Britannica:

Sinwar’s release came as part of the high-profile prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit. Shalit, a soldier of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), had been abducted by Hamas in 2006 while he was stationed at a border crossing. After several failed attempts to broker Shalit’s freedom, Egypt and Germany secured a deal for his release in October 2011. Sinwar’s brother, Mohammed, who had been assigned to guard Shalit, insisted that Sinwar be included in the exchange. On the same day that Shalit was released to Israel, Sinwar was among the first set of Palestinian prisoners who were returned to the Gaza Strip.

Sinwar, jailed for decades, arrived in Gaza sporting his green militant headband. His fiery rhetoric fueled a meteoric rise through the ranks, and in mere months he was assuming leadership positions, beginning to seal the once-fragmented militant groups in Gaza, and planning the annihilation of Israel.

Crown Jewel of Sinwar’s Bloody, Bloody Ways: The October 7th Massacre

By 2017, Sinwar had great power in HAMAS and with allies in groups overseas. Heappeared (falsely) to be sidling up to the notion of a two-state solution. All that disappeared in 2021. Weeks of increasing hostilities, particularly at Al-Aqsa Mosque, had left hundreds of Israelis and Palestinians injured. Hamas responded by sending rockets into Jerusalem and southern and central Israel, prompting 11 days of intense fighting.

Writes Britannica:

Sinwar’s popularity surged after the conflict, and his virulence returned in full force. At a rally in 2022 celebrating the anniversary of Hamas’s founding, he called upon each person to “be ready to rise up as a gale to defend Al-Aqsa” if Israel would not conclude a deal to release Palestinian prisoners. In rhyming Arabic he continued to muster the crowd: “We will come to you in a roaring flood, in rockets without end, and in a flood of soldiers limitless [in number]. We will come to you with millions of our people (ummah), one tide after another.”

On October 7, 2023, in an operation named “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood”, HAMAS attacked.

Under cover provided by a barrage of at least 2,200 rockets in 20 minutes, at least 1,500 militants infiltrated Israel at dozens of points along the heavily fortified border by using explosives, bulldozers, and paragliders. They attacked military outposts, butchered families inside their homes, and slaughtered attendees of an outdoor music festival. Within hours, roughly 1,200 people were dead and some 245 others were taken hostage. Sinwar’s fingerprints were all the assault, including the taking of hostages, which reflected his obsession with prisoner exchanges.

But an important note.

The real pretext for these attacks may not have been the conflicts around Al-Aqsa, which is so often ground zero for violence between Palestinians and Israelis. This time, it may really have been the shift of Saudi Arabia away from support of armed conflict between HAMAS and Israel—and toward establishing diplomatic relationships with Israel at the same time it was establishing diplomatic relationships with Iran after decades of Sunni-Shia acrimony.

Before detailing the craven, world-threatening, bloody retaliation by Netanyahu—who went to war to keep himself out of prison—let’s look at what the ICC says about what Haniyeh and Sinwar, along with one of their cronies.

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The ICC Indictment of Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri (Deif), and Ismail Haniyeh

The indictment and request for international arrest warrants, written by Karim A.A. Khan, reads:

On the basis of evidence collected and examined by my Office, I have reasonable grounds to believe that Yahya SINWAR (Head of the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) in the Gaza Strip), Mohammed Diab Ibrahim AL-MASRI, more commonly known as DEIF (Commander-in-Chief of the military wing of Hamas, known as the Al-Qassam Brigades), and Ismail HANIYEH (Head of Hamas Political Bureau) bear criminal responsibility for the following war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of Israel and the State of Palestine (in the Gaza strip) from at least 7 October 2023: 

• Extermination as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(b) of the Rome Statute;

• Murder as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(a), and as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i);

• Taking hostages as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(iii);

• Rape and other acts of sexual violence as crimes against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(g), and also as war crimes pursuant to article 8(2)(e)(vi) in the context of captivity;

• Torture as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(1)(f), and also as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity;

• Other inhumane acts as a crime against humanity, contrary to article 7(l)(k), in the context of captivity;

• Cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i), in the context of captivity; and

• Outrages upon personal dignity as a war crime, contrary to article 8(2)(c)(ii), in the context of captivity.

My Office submits that the war crimes alleged in these applications were committed in the context of an international armed conflict between Israel and Palestine, and a non-international armed conflict between Israel and Hamas running in parallel. We submit that the crimes against humanity charged were part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Israel by Hamas and other armed groups pursuant to organisational policies. Some of these crimes, in our assessment, continue to this day.

My Office submits there are reasonable grounds to believe that SINWAR, DEIF and HANIYEH are criminally responsible for the killing of hundreds of Israeli civilians in attacks perpetrated by Hamas (in particular its military wing, the al-Qassam Brigades) and other armed groups on 7 October 2023 and the taking of at least 245 hostages. As part of our investigations, my Office has interviewed victims and survivors, including former hostages and eyewitnesses from six major attack locations: Kfar Aza; Holit; the location of the Supernova Music Festival; Be’eri; Nir Oz; and Nahal Oz. The investigation also relies on evidence such as CCTV footage, authenticated audio, photo and video material, statements by Hamas members including the alleged perpetrators named above, and expert evidence.

It is the view of my Office that these individuals planned and instigated the commission of crimes on 7 October 2023, and have through their own actions, including personal visits to hostages shortly after their kidnapping, acknowledged their responsibility for those crimes. We submit that these crimes could not have been committed without their actions. They are charged both as co-perpetrators and as superiors pursuant to Articles 25 and 28 of the Rome Statute.

During my own visit to Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Kfar Aza, as well as to the site of Supernova Music Festival in Re’im, I saw the devastating scenes of these attacks and the profound impact of the unconscionable crimes charged in the applications filed today. Speaking with survivors, I heard how the love within a family, the deepest bonds between a parent and a child, were contorted to inflict unfathomable pain through calculated cruelty and extreme callousness. These acts demand accountability.

My Office also submits there are reasonable grounds to believe that hostages taken from Israel have been kept in inhumane conditions, and that some have been subject to sexual violence, including rape, while being held in captivity. We have reached that conclusion based on medical records, contemporaneous video and documentary evidence, and interviews with victims and survivors. My Office also continues to investigate reports of sexual violence committed on 7 October.

I wish to express my gratitude to the survivors, and the families of victims of the 7 October attacks, for their courage in coming forward to provide their accounts to my Office. We remain focused on further deepening our investigations of all crimes committed as part of these attacks and will continue to work with all partners to ensure that justice is delivered.

I again reiterate my call for the immediate release of all hostages taken from Israel and for their safe return to their families. This is a fundamental requirement of international humanitarian law.

Karim A. A. Kham, Chief Prosecutor, International Criminal Court …

Next Up: Netanyahu, in Part II.

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Meanwhile, as a background to the article, please read our article on Ben Ferencz—the most successful prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials—and the primary architect of the International Criminal Court, the only international tribunal that brings people to justice for crimes against humanity.

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Part II coming soon.