On November 21, 2024, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alleging war crimes in Gaza. The ICC process is an example of “Sentence first—verdict afterward” justice.
The ICC based its warrants on subjective politics, not on law or objective consideration of evidence. Staffed by political appointees, the court seeks to arrest individuals over whom they have no jurisdiction, in this case for alleged crimes in a nonexistent country, while ignoring any evidence that might run contrary to their tunnel vision. This was a predetermined ruling, backfilled with arguments.
The ICC alleges that Israel, which has provided its enemy with over one million metric tons of aid during wartime, has imposed “starvation” on Gaza. It ignores the humanitarian aid operation Israel orchestrated in cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), even though many UNRWA employees are on Hamas payroll. International donors provided $2 billion toward the Gazan aid, none of which reached the 101 Israeli hostages that Hamas still holds unlawfully in Gaza. Indeed, the United Nations has not confirmed a single starvation case; UN investigators simply accept Hamas accounts. In the words of Luis Moreno Ocampo, Khan’s predecessor at the ICC, “Everyone knows starvation happened” in Gaza.
The United Nations has not confirmed a single starvation case; UN investigators simply accept Hamas accounts.
The Gaza Health Ministry, an arm of the Hamas-run government, provides the bricks that construct the anti-Israeli edifice, claiming that Israel’s operations have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians. This data, too, remains unverified; the UN cannot say how many of the dead were terrorists, how many died because of rockets misfired by Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or how many were natural deaths.
During the war, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has ordered millions of Palestinians to move into safe zones. They trusted IDF precision and defied Hamas demands that they remain in place as human shields. Israeli tanks safeguarded them from Hamas sniper fire.
Nor can the ICC explain its “genocide” terminology for Gaza, where the Palestinian population has been growing at 2 percent annually.
The lack of due process, not simply the absence of evidence, has rattled Jerusalem. Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, nor does the court have jurisdiction in countries with an independent judicial system. Only in cases such as Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milošević’s war crimes, when local courts are “unwilling and unable” to prosecute, can the ICC intervene.
The reality is a desire for media limelight, rather than any real criteria to determine ICC involvement.
In this case, the opposite party to the ruling would be Palestine, which the ICC admitted in 2015 in violation of the Oslo Accords. Since the court cannot discuss unrecognized territories, it agreed to define one for the sake of protocol in 2021. Hungarian Judge Péter Kovács issued a dissenting opinion, criticizing the court for its lack of legal basis.
The reality is a desire for media limelight, rather than any real criteria to determine ICC involvement. There is no other explanation. Why would the ICC would ignore Yemen, Libya, Sudan, South Sudan, or the Kurdistan region of Turkey, where death tolls in some cases are much greater than even Hamas’s fanciful claims?
President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump condemned the ICC move. They recognize that a politicized ICC could quickly shift its fire toward the United States. Biden should act decisively, much as Trump did when, in the twilight of his first term, the ICC launched an investigation into the actions of American troops in Afghanistan. The Trump administration slapped sanctions on senior officials, who “de-prioritized” it. When Biden entered office, the ICC again went on the offensive, resuming its investigation. Biden himself could be in legal peril for his role as vice president and president, given how much higher the civilian collateral damage was in Afghanistan.
The West’s response to the ICC’s Israel calumny should be clear. The ICC is only as strong as its legitimacy and its funding. Democracies that value their sovereignty should pull out and cease funding the ICC. Rather than respect the ruling on Israel, they should lead opposition to it. They may gloat over seeing Israel in the hot seat, but they could be next. The ICC has shredded its credibility. It is time to end its charade in its entirety.
