**PARİS/ISTANBUL**
Omer Shatz, a French lawyer of Israeli origin who filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against 8 Israelis for “incitement to genocide,” argued that the crime of genocide can be committed by making living conditions unbearable through starvation, blocking humanitarian aid and bombing hospitals.
Shatz, who examined speeches of Israeli politicians and public figures within the scope of “incitement to genocide” crimes with his students at Sciences Po Paris University, filed a complaint with the ICC on Dec. 6 against six Israeli officials and two Israeli citizens for “incitement to genocide” in Gaza.
Shatz explained to Anadolu that the complaint was prepared as a result of the research conducted within the scope of a master's degree in human rights and humanitarian action in law at Sciences Po Paris.
He said that the plaintiffs have been examining speeches of Israeli politicians and personalities since October 2023 which they think fall under the crime of “incitement to genocide.”
**We preferred to proceed in a more robust way**
Emphasizing that there have been discussions about what happened in the Gaza Strip and most legal experts agree on the difficulty of proving genocide, Shatz said, “So, we chose to go down a more robust path because, although it is not widely known, most people believe that the Rome Statute, which is the Constitution of the International Criminal Court, has four crimes -- war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression and genocide. In our case, we show that there is a fifth crime, which is an independent crime of 'incitement to genocide'.”
He pointed out that it is an unorthodox situation as “the peculiarity of this crime is that it can be established before the main crime is proven. In this case (the original crime) would be genocide.”
Emphasizing that a witness to a genocide or crime against humanity must prove the crime was committed, Shatz said that “the only exception is this crime, which is called ‘incitement to genocide.’ In fact, this includes a direct and public call for others to commit acts of genocide.”
Shatz explained that the plaintiffs first determined the crime of incitement to genocide according to the elements of the crime in the Rome Statute, and then conducted a comparative study on the standards of evidence in the Israeli case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
“Beyond the ICC's legislation, we show that the Prosecutor General (Khan) cannot ignore what is happening in another court in The Hague,” Shatz said, adding that according to those standards, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan must also open an investigation against eight Israelis.
Shatz noted that on Jan. 26, 2024, the ICC ruled that the risk of genocide in Gaza was possible and urged Israel to punish those who incite genocide.
**‘For them, all of them (Gazans) are criminals’**
Explaining that they started from the question of “whether Israeli soldiers in Gaza listened to these incitements to genocide,” Shatz said that one of two people called for killing 5,000 Palestinians, including civilians.
Shatz highlighted that the other person called for “cleansing” the north of Gaza and said: “What these eight people have in common is that they do not make any distinction between civilians and combatants. For them, all (Gazans) are criminals, but they themselves call for killing women, children and destroying the entire population.”
He underlined that “genocide” does not only mean killing entire people, as is commonly believed but also “about starvation, blocking humanitarian aid, making living conditions unbearable by bombing cultural sites, universities, hospitals.”
“The idea behind this is that if we want to prevent genocide, we must first prosecute incitement to genocide,” Shatz said, adding that the crime of incitement to genocide is independently defined so that a country's prosecutor or the ICC prosecutor can take action.
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