Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated that he hopes the International Criminal Court will withdraw its arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, stating that while he believes that crimes were committed in Gaza, those alleged crimes do not rise to the level of genocide.
“I very much hope that they (the ICC) will remove the arrest warrants from the Prime Minister and Minister Galant,” Olmert said in an interview with i24NEWS. “We may have committed crimes, and I said it, and I accused the State of Israel for doing it. And this is not something that can be ignored or wiped out.”
He added: “There was no genocide. There was not a policy of genocide. There was not a policy of war crimes. There were war crimes, as happens unfortunately. The war crimes which I am much more concerned about are the war crimes which are committed on a daily basis in the territories, in the West Bank, by Israelis - with the closing of the eyes of the Israeli police and the Israeli army.”
Olmert, who spent 16 months in prison for graft, has frequently criticized Israel's response to the October 7 massacre while speaking to foreign media. In May, he claimed to the BBC that the war against Hamas was "a war without a purpose - a war without a chance of achieving anything that can save the lives of the hostages." He also claimed that what Israel "is doing now in Gaza is very close to a war crime."
The former Prime Minister asserted that the "obvious appearance" of the war in Gaza is that thousands of innocent Gazans are being killed, as well as many Israeli soldiers.
"From every point of view, this is obnoxious and outrageous. We are fighting the killers of Hamas, we are not fighting innocent civilians. And that has to be clear," he told the BBC.
Olmert also criticized Israel's strike on Hamas leaders in Doha, the capital of Qatar, calling for Israeli leaders to be prosecuted over the strike in an interview with Al Jazeera.
In June, then-candidate for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been mired in antisemitism controversies, cited Olmert's attacks on the Israeli government as justification for his one-sided criticism of Israel.