Family of dead activist takes Palestinian Authority to ICC

THE HAGUE: The family of Palestinian activist Nizar Banat submitted a case on Thursday to the International Criminal Court accusing top Palestinian officials over his death in custody, relatives told AFP.

Banat, a leading critic of the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas, died in June 2021 after being dragged from his home in the occupied West Bank by security forces. A post-mortem found he had been beaten on the head, chest, neck, legs and hands, with less than an hour elapsing between his arrest and his death.

“Our only hope is in the International Criminal Court,” the activist´s brother, Ghassan Banat, told AFP outside the tribunal in the Dutch city of The Hague. “The time has come to achieve justice for the martyr Nizar Banat, after the authority has failed for more than a year and a half to achieve justice.”