Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is slated to meet with the top brass of Israel's political, military, and legal apparatuses on Tuesday to decide how Israel should respond to the International Criminal Court at The Hague's decision to launch an investigation into Israel for alleged "war crimes" committed in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
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Specifically, the meeting is expected to decide how Israel should reply to ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda's query about whether Israel intends to investigate itself for the allegations the ICC is probing, or not.
Defense Minister Benny Gantz, Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi, Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit, Deputy Attorney General for International Law Roy Schöndorf, legal counsel for the Foreign Ministry Tal Becker, and other officials are slated to participate in the meeting.
Israel is deliberating between the option of entirely ignoring Bensouda's query, on the grounds that Israel is not a member of the ICC and therefore does not recognize its authority and sees the probe itself as a biased political move.
The second option would be to respond to Bensouda with a terse letter, saying that the prosecutor has no authority to handle the matter.
Lower-level meetings over the past few weeks failed to reach agreement on the appropriate tack to take, and therefore the matter was placed before Netanyahu.
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