The Israeli prime minister is subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for war crimes in Gaza.
Poland’s president this week asked the government to guarantee safe passage for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of an event to mark the 80th anniversary of the allied liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp despite the arrest warrant issued against him.
President Andrzej Duda, from the opposition Law and Justice party, wrote to Prime Minister Donald Tusk’sgovernment requesting Netanyahu not be arrested if he sets foot on Polish soil to attend the commemoration, which will take place on Jan. 27, his spokesperson confirmed Thursday.
Netanyahu is the subject of an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant issued in November last year for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
Israel has been carrying out a military offensive in the enclave since October 2023, killing tens of thousands of people as it attempts to root out Hamas in response to the Palestinian militant group’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel.
The ICC warrant means Netanyahu could be arrested if he travels to any of the 120 countries that are parties to the ICC — though some, including France and Hungary, have declared they will not arrest him.
According to Polish media outlet Interia, which obtained a copy of Duda’s letter, the president wrote: “The government of Poland should guarantee [Netanyahu] an undisturbed stay on the territory of our country in these absolutely exceptional circumstances.”
Netanyahu has not publicly expressed a desire to attend the commemoration, nor was he invited to do so by its organizer, the Auschwitz Museum, which told Polish media it had only extended invitations to Holocaust survivors.
About one million people were systematically killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis at the Auschwitz camp, the vast majority of whom were Jews, and it is often described as the largest mass murder site in history.
