WASHINGTON

US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib on Thursday welcomed the “long overdue” decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In a statement, the Michigan Democrat said the warrants signal an end to the days of the Israeli government operating with impunity.

"Since this genocide began, the United States has provided more than $18 billion in weapons to the Israeli government,” Tlaib said, adding the Biden administration "can no longer deny that those same US weapons have been used in countless war crimes," including the use of "starvation as a weapon of war.”

“Our government must urgently end our complicity in these violations of human rights and international law,” she said. “Netanyahu and Gallant must be arrested and brought before the ICC.”

The Hague-based court announced the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant earlier in the day "for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024," when ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan sought the warrants.

In doing so, it also unanimously rejected Israel's challenges to jurisdiction under articles 18 and 19 of the Rome Statute.

The court said it “found reasonable grounds” to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant "bear criminal responsibility" for "the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts."

The warrants come as Israel’s genocidal offensive in the Gaza Strip recently entered its second year, having already killed some 44,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

The Israeli onslaught has displaced almost the entire population of the territory amid an ongoing and deliberate blockade that has led to severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine, pushing the population to the brink of starvation.