TEHRAN - Following arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his sacked war minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, the name of Israel will be remembered as a war criminal regime in history.

Before the Gaza war, Israel had been trying to present a distorted image of itself to the world. However, its allies in the West knew well that Israel was practicing apartheid against the native Palestinians.

Israel’s history is replete with crimes. The 1956 Kafr Qasem massacre is just one example.

To those who were studying and observing Israel’s practices against Palestinians, the name of Israel was synonymous with crime, occupation, violence, violation of international law, theft, and apartheid.

However, since October 2023, the people in the world have been seeing with their own eyes that Israel sees no limit to its crimes and that the regime is unbelievably brutal.

The West had also been deceitfully trying to present Israel as a country that respects human rights. But its claims proved shamefully false.

How can a country that pretended it would respect the principles of human rights make no difference between a combatant and a civilian and kill indiscriminately?

The regime’s thirst for death and destruction is insatiable. Just nine days into the Gaza war, Neve Gordon, a professor of international law at Queen Mary University of London, wrote, “I asked myself how much more killing and destruction will be necessary to satisfy this death drive” that followed the October 7 attack by Hamas on southern Israel.

Unfortunately, massive anti-war protesters in American and European cities and universities have been designated as anti-Semitic. Even Netanyahu has called the ICC’s arrest warrants anti-Semitic. 

A regime must be cruel to limit water and medical supplies, intentionally starve 2.3 million people, flatten their homes, force them - many of them old and sick - to flee from one place to another, make deplorable attacks on hospitals, bury people alive, force doctors to operate and carry out amputations without anesthetics, and many other unspeakable crimes.

The way Israel has been behaving and is continuing to behave toward the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank will not be forgotten from the memory of the world. Its treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is a clear example of apartheid but in Gaza apartheid is combined with torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.