The International Criminal Court has now joined the list of bureaucratic entities posing as impartial international adjudicators, accusing Israel of war crimes.
On Monday, prosecutor Karim Khan revealed that the ICC is seeking arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as three prominent Hamas officials, including the group’s leader, Yahya Sinwar.
The accusations against the Hamas leaders mirror the group’s manifesto: extermination, murder, hostage-taking, sexual violence, and torture.
The charges against Netanyahu and Gallant include starvation of civilians, intentional killing and suffering, and deliberate attacks on civilian targets.
First, it must be noted that this is mostly symbolic drama. The ICC does hold prosecutorial power for certain crimes, but it depends entirely on the police forces of member nations to carry out arrests. Since neither Israel nor the United States has ratified the statute underpinning the ICC’s authority, the likelihood of Netanyahu or Gallant being summoned to this court is minimal.
However, that’s not the crux of the issue. The real point is that the ICC, much like the United Nations, has veered into participating in the broader agenda against rational thought, reason, and the very existence of the Jewish state of Israel.
One must be clear: the charges against Israeli leaders are egregious. This surpasses mere naivety about the inevitable impact of war on civilians and ventures into willful blindness. Israel goes to greater lengths than any other military to protect civilians—who are often used as human shields by Hamas—managing to invade Gaza while maintaining one of the lowest civilian casualty rates in urban warfare history.
Despite these efforts, Israel stands accused of genocide.
Hamas terrorists, who proudly broadcast their genocidal intentions, are being charged with crimes they have openly committed and shared with the world on Oct. 7, yet they are only charged alongside Israel, making for a grotesque moral equivalence.
The ICC employs an “All Lives Matter” logic, criticized as racist during the Black Lives Matter movement, to equate Islamic terrorism’s immorality with Israel’s justified defensive actions in the face of continuous threats of annihilation.
Ironically, senior Hamas member Sami Abu Zuhri remarked to Reuters that seeking arrest warrants for Hamas officials “equates the victim with the executioner.”
By contrast, the attempt to prosecute leaders of a democratic nation like Israel for defending its people against Hamas’s genocidal intent indeed “equates the victim with the executioner.”
Israel is engaged in dismantling a terrorist organization intent on eliminating Jews worldwide while providing humanitarian aid, warnings, and safe pathways for Palestinian civilians, resulting in historically low civilian casualties in urban combat settings. If Israel cannot defend itself with such precautions without facing war crime allegations, what alternatives remain?
