Washington, April 7 (RHC)-- Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly taken a flight detour to the United States, with his plane avoiding the airspace of several countries that could enforce an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against the war criminal.
Israeli media reported that Netanyahu’s aircraft took off from the Hungarian capital of Budapest and landed in Washington on Sunday after flying through a path about 400 kilometers longer.
The plane flew over Croatia, Italy and France and avoided the airspace of Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands due to concerns that the latter trio could have acted on the ICC warrant against Netanyahu in the case of an emergency landing.
It was not the first time that Netanyahu’s flight had taken a convoluted route to avoid the risk of him being arrested. In February, he traveled to Washington weeks after undergoing surgery. The flight took a longer path to ensure that it was flying over U.S. army bases in an event that it needed to land for medical reasons.
In November 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former minister of military affairs Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes related to Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The ruling obliged all the 125 countries, which signed the Rome Statute establishing the ICC, to detain and surrender the pair to the Hague-based court.
The Israeli prime minister traveled to Hungary, which is a member of the ICC, on Thursday. The ICC asked the Hungarian government to arrest him, but Budapest refused to comply with the request and promptly announced it was quitting the court.
Israel unleashed its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas resistance group carried out its historic operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Tel Aviv regime has so far killed at least 50,695 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 115,475 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
