Transparency & Accountability
The ICC holds Netanyahu's warrant as Washington sanctions its judges
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Twenty-one months after it was signed, the arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu is still in force — and the fight over it has reshaped two courts.
The International Criminal Court's Pre-Trial Chamber I issued warrants on 21 November 2024 for Netanyahu and his then defence minister Yoav Gallant, finding reasonable grounds to believe they bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts committed against Gaza's population from 8 October 2023 to at least 20 May 2024.
The chamber rejected Israel's challenges to the court's jurisdiction when it issued the warrants, and the court's judges have since refused every Israeli attempt to undo them, ruling in 2025 that Israel's framing of the question was not even subject to appeal and recalling that the court's jurisdiction extends to Gaza and the West Bank alike.
Roughly 124 states parties to the Rome Statute remain legally obliged to arrest the Israeli prime minister the moment he touches their soil.
What has changed is the price the court is paying for holding that line.
The Trump administration opened its campaign in February 2025 with an executive order sanctioning the court's prosecutor, Karim Khan, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has since widened the list four times — four judges in June 2025, both deputy prosecutors and two more judges in August 2025, and two further judges in December 2025 — bringing the total to eleven sanctioned officials of a court neither the United States nor Israel has joined.
The measures now cover the prosecutor, his deputies Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang, who have run the office since Khan stepped aside in May 2025 pending a United Nations misconduct investigation, and eight judges including the court's vice-president.
A United Nations special rapporteur demanded in January 2026 that Washington withdraw the sanctions, calling them an assault on judicial independence. In July, the legal news service JURIST reported, President Trump ruled out any arrest of Netanyahu outright as his administration escalated the pressure.
Hungary — which hosted Netanyahu in Budapest in April 2025 in open defiance of the warrant — became the first European Union state to leave the court, its withdrawal taking effect in June 2026.
The second Hague court moves on a separate track, and the distinction matters: the International Criminal Court tries individuals, while the International Court of Justice judges states.
In the genocide case South Africa brought against Israel in December 2023, the ICJ ordered provisional measures three times in 2024, and Israel finally filed its long-delayed written response in March 2026 after two extensions.
Thirteen states — among them Türkiye, Spain, Ireland, Chile, Mexico and Palestine itself — have applied to intervene, and legal analysts quoted by Middle East Eye expect the case to reach oral argument in The Hague within the coming year.
Alongside the contentious case sit the court's advisory opinions: the July 2024 finding that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible, and the October 2025 opinion on Israel's obligations toward the United Nations and humanitarian relief in Gaza.
For Palestinians, the two dockets are the longest-running answer to the question of where the war goes when the guns pause: into law.
The warrant has not put Netanyahu in a courtroom, and Washington has promised it never will — but it has redrawn his map, obliging every ICC member state to choose between its treaty and his aircraft, and it has survived every appeal Israel has filed.
Times of Palestine opens a standing watch on both courts with this report and will cover every significant filing, ruling and act of compliance or defiance, in both languages, as it lands.
