ICAI (HOKOK), on behalf of its affiliates and the International Community
Against
1. Prime Minister, Ehud OLMERT.
2. Defense Minister Ehud BARAK.
3. Deputy Defense Minister Matan VILNAI.
4. Minister of Internal Security Avraham DICHTER.
5. Armed Forces Chief of Staff Gabi ASHKENZI. The above enumerated individuals are jointly and severally liable for the Crimes committed in Gaza by their Government. And each has been shown by investigation to be a co-conspirator.

Bearing in mind it was written before the onslaught It's worth reading the full original submission here, :
peoplesgeography.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/letter_of_notification_and_referral_final.pdf


The ICC Prosecutor won't take any Gazan case with a UN Security Council referal, as Israel never ratified the Rome Treaty. The US hasn't yet signed up to the ICC either yet although Obama has indictated he will. The US is still likely to veto any UN referal of either Israel to the ICC although there are rational reasons for them not to.

Israel did enthusiastically sign and ratify the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and is party to other other international law and convention which apply to Gaza, for instance the Geneva conventions. Eighty countries have incorporated the Genocide convention into their national law so cases can be lauched from those countries. In theory any one of us can launch a legal action on anyone else for genocide.

An Israeli activist website, wanted.org.il, urges people to report to the ICC when war-criminals such as Ehud Barak are leaving the country so that they can be arrested, but they should really be informing us too. It is down now with a 'bandwith limit exceeded' note after Haaretz featured it.

This prompted the Israeli Military Censor to ban the media naming or identifying any soldier that took part in the massacre. Daniel Friedman, the Israeli justice minister has just been put in charge of defending Israel against charges of war crimes. There are rumours in the US legal press of armies of lawyers being deployed on behalf of the Israelis and high profile names like Professor Dershowitz in the lead

Franklin Lamb drafted the court submission on behalf of ICAI HOKOK. This following is an extract of Franklin Lambs most recent article on Gazan war crimes, dismissing Dershowitz and talking about genocide charges:

It's beginning to look a lot like Genocide!
Professor Dershowitz in seeking to exempt Israel from the requirements of International Law has consistently argued that since Israel has not signed the Rome Statute and has not submitted to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, that Israel is not bound by the Rome Statute's International Law as noted below. He errs in his interpretation of the Rules of International Law and is quite mistaken that the provisions of the Rome Statute do not apply to Israel.

International Customary Law i.e. legal norms accepted by the vast majority of States, plus the United Nations, are binding on all States, including Israel. The Rome Statute does not make new law like, for example, some contract that Israel would have to sign in order to be bound by it. All states are bound by the law restated in Treaty form in the Rome Statute. Its binding provisions include Article 7 and Article 8 very applicable to the current carnage raging in Gaza.

Given that the Rome Statute imbued the International Criminal Court with 'Universal Jurisdiction' over all people and given further that the Rome Statute rejects Impunity for any person, which Israel has consistently used, for example in US Courts such as the recent Qana Case brought by the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights, Israeli leaders are now bound and can be tried jointly, severally and personally in the Hague. So can George W. Bush and Mohammad Hosni Mubarak even though neither country has yet become a signatory of the Rome Statute.

Article 7 of the Rome Statute, outlaws "a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population', which involves "persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender" grounds ." Such projects, to which Palestinians have been subjected for more than 60 years, constitute a crime against humanity.

What Israel has been doing in Gaza and Palestine comes very close to genocide according to the provisions of the Genocide Convention (1948), reiterated in the Rome Charter of the International Criminal Court (2002), which includes: '(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part' (6). Some of Professor Dershowitz's colleagues consider that the launching of rockets into Israel by Hamas, like the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, constitute a legitimate response to impending extermination and are a desperate bid for survival.

 http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/7298-fact-and-law-checking-the-wall-street-journal-and-alan-dershowitz-part-ii-dershowitz-misstates-misrepresents-and-misapplies-the-law-.html


Article 2
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
 http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm

Israeli human rights activists: Arrest Olmert, Livni, and Barak for war crimes
 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057351.html

IDF censor bans identification of officers involved in Gaza operation
 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057964.html