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NGO: Ascension to ICC Exposes PA to War Crimes Prosecutions

Victims of Palestinian terror should bring their claims to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in response to the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) application to join the court, Shurat Hadin, Israel Law Center, wrote in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

Today, Mahmoud Abbas signed the Rome Treaty to join the ICC. The day has arrived for Shurat HaDin to release the tsunami of complaints against the Palestinians.

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of Palestinian terrorism, please contact Shurat HaDin and we will make sure to bring your claim before the ICC.

Similarly, Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center released a statement predicting that both the PA and Hamas, which agreed to a unity government with the PA, would be subject to prosecutions when they officially joined the court.

“Further, Mr. Abbas and his cronies, in the Palestinian Authority as well as Hamas and its leadership are in for a surprise,” the Rabbis said, adding, “While they pursue phony charges of war crimes against Israel, they themselves will have to wait behind a long line of thousands of bereaved families whose lives were destroyed by Palestinian terrorists as well as face charges of incitement to genocide.”

The Algemeiner reported that Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat Hadin, has already laid the groundwork for such prosecutions:

In a potential sign that Israel could bring its own cases against Palestinian leaders to the ICC, Shurat HaDin has already filed separate cases at the court targeting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal, both of whom are Jordanian citizens and therefore potentially under the court’s jurisdiction. Darshan-Leitner said that Abbas, in his capacity as the leader of the Fatah movement, was guilty of war crimes for permitting PA territory to be used to stage attacks against Israel, while Mashaal had authorized the extra-judicial execution of 39 Palestinians in Gaza after they were accused of collaborating with Israel during the summer 2014 war with Hamas.

At the time Shurat Hadin filed the case against Abbas it explained that “[t]he basis of the allegations are reports of Fatah-affiliated armed groups firing significant numbers of rockets on Israel from Gaza during this summer’s Gaza war along with Hamas, who fired most of the rockets.”

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a former prosecutor for the ICC, warned Abbas last year that joining the court would expose the PA to possible prosecutions.

The general strategy of Shurat Hadin was outlined in The Woman Who Makes the Jihadis Squirm, which was published in the February 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine by editor, David Hazony:

Through her nonprofit legal center, Shurat HaDin (“letter of the law” in Hebrew), Nitsana has spent the last decade and a half battling terrorism through civil lawsuits. Representing terror victims from Israel, the United States, Canada, Iran, and elsewhere, she files motions and seizes assets and sends warnings. She has become a menace to terrorists, putting them on their heels, forcing them and their sponsors to spend vast sums on legal fees, to stop using the Western banking industry, to smuggle cash through tunnels instead of using the banks.

In the process she has revolutionized the way the civilized world deals with terrorism. Governments that clearly back terror organizations—like Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the Palestinian Authority—have found their assets frozen, even turned over to victims. Terrorist groups, states that sponsor terror, banks that facilitate terror financing, companies that do business with terrorists—all of these have found themselves diverting attention, resources, and immense energies to dealing with high-profile lawsuits. Major corporations have discovered that they cannot operate with impunity.

[Photo: WochitGeneralNews / YouTube