BREAKING NEWS

Palestinians submit new evidence of alleged Israeli war crimes to ICC

The Palestinians handed a fresh dossier of evidence to the International Criminal Court in an attempt to get the war crimes tribunal to expand its existing probe of last year's Gaza conflict to include the upsurge in violence of the past month.
Emerging from the court, Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said the new dossier, the third he has submitted this year, contained evidence of "extrajudicial killing, home demolition, collective punishment" including from the past 40 days.
"(We took) also examples of cases that have really occurred in the last 40 days of Israeli aggression against innocent Palestinians around occupied territory," he told reporters after a meeting with prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.
The Palestinian Authority joined the ICC at the beginning of this year, over the protests of Israel, the United States and most of the court's European backers, who have said legal action in The Hague risks delaying the course of peace.
Israel, which is not a member of the court, has declined to cooperate with both this and a previous probe relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that Palestine is not a state and so has no right to join.
Prosecutors earlier this year opened a preliminary probe of alleged crimes committed on both sides of the Gaza conflict, but, with all accessible gateways to Gaza controlled by Israel, Hague officials have not yet visited the scene of the alleged crimes.