ICC WARNS ISRAEL, GAZA LEADERS MAY FACE WAR CRIMES QUIZ

Individuals involved in a new eruption of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed may be targeted by an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation now underway into alleged war crimes in earlier bouts of the conflict, its top prosecutor said in an interview, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.

The ICC's Fatou Bensouda also told Reuters she would press ahead with her inquiry even without the cooperation of Israel, which accuses her office of anti-Semitic bias and – like its closest ally the United States – rejected membership in the treaty-based court, objecting to its jurisdiction.

Israel and Palestinian Islamist groups plunged this week into their fiercest round of fighting since 2014, with punishing Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and militants based in the densely populated enclave firing over 1,600 rockets into Israel.

At least 120 Palestinians and eight Israelis have died, along with two Lebanese protesters gunned down by Israeli soldiers at the Israeli-Lebanon border.

"These are events that we are looking at very seriously," Bensouda said. "We are monitoring very closely and I remind that an investigation has opened and the evolution of these events could also be something we look at."

In March, her office said it was opening a formal investigation into suspected war crimes in the conflict after nearly five years of preliminary inquiries. It said it had reasonable basis to believe offenses had been committed by both the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups, including militants of the Hamas group, in the Gaza Strip and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

"This is just to alert people on all sides not to escalate, to be careful to avoid taking actions that will result in the commission of (war) crimes," Bensouda said in a reference to the current hostilities.

The ICC, based in The Hague, is an independent, permanent war crimes court that succeeded ad hoc UN tribunals which tackled the 1990s Rwandan genocide and Yugoslav conflict. It prosecutes individuals, not countries, when a member state is unwilling or unable to do so itself.

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