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US politicians threaten to invade the International Criminal Court if Israel is accused of war crimes

Vaseline

US government officials have threatened the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, telling prosecutor Karim Khan that if he issues arrest warrants against Israeli officials for their war crimes in Gaza, the US government could impose sanctions on him and other ICC personnel. and their family members.

US senators even threatened to invade The Hague if it tried to prosecute Israeli officials.

UN experts: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza

In April, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a prominent member of the state security cabinet, called for the “total destruction” of Gaza. He cited God’s command to wipe out the Biblical nation of Amalek – a genocidal reference also made by far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The UN’s highest legal body, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruled in January that Israel could be investigated on “plausible” allegations of violating the Genocide Convention. (The ICJ and the ICC are separate institutions, although both are based in The Hague.)

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have stated that Israel is in violation of this ruling by the International Court of Justice, which requires the country to adhere to the Genocide Convention.

Top UN experts have clearly warned that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

In addition to bombing civilian areas and killing tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, Israel has used hunger as a weapon, starving Palestinian civilians.

The US director of the UN World Food Program warned that Gaza is now suffering from “full famine” after seven months of a suffocating Israeli blockade.

The US government has supplied the vast majority of the weapons that Israel uses to bomb civilian areas in Gaza. If Israeli officials are indicted for their war crimes, Washington would be complicit.

US senators threaten to sanction and invade the ICC

On April 24, a dozen Republican senators sent a threatening letter to the ICC prosecutor. The media channel Zeteo obtained the document.

The missive was signed by major Republican leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton.

In the aggressively worded letter, the senators vowed to “sanction your employees and associates and deny you and your families entry into the United States” if Israeli officials are indicted for their war crimes in Gaza.

“Target Israel and we will attack you,” they threatened.

Issuing an arrest warrant against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top Israeli officials would be viewed “not only as a threat to the sovereignty of Israel, but also to the sovereignty of the United States,” the US officials wrote.

“Our country has shown in the American Service-Members’ Protection Act how far we will go to protect that sovereignty,” they added.

The American Service-Members’ Protection Act is colloquially known as the “Hague Invasion Act”. The legislation was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002.

Human Rights Watch explained that this law “authorizes the use of military force to free any American or citizen of a country allied with the US who is being held in court.”

By invoking the Hague Invasion Act in their 2024 letter to the ICC prosecutor, Republican senators made it clear that the two-decade-old law is still valid: Washington hawks are prepared to invade The Hague to target Israeli rescue officials when they are persecuted .

The Hague Invasion Act Human Rights Watch

The Biden administration has double standards regarding the ICC

It is not just the Republicans who threaten the ICC. In Washington this is twofold.

The Israeli press reported that behind the scenes, the Joe Biden administration is also aggressively pressuring the ICC not to issue arrest warrants against Israeli officials.

In 2020, while Donald Trump was in the White House, the ICC opened an investigation into war crimes committed during the war in Afghanistan. US and NATO forces were involved in this investigation.

Out of anger, the US government imposed sanctions on The Hague. Trump administration officials even threatened family members of ICC personnel.

When Biden came to power in 2021, he tried to distinguish himself from his Republican predecessor. Secretary of State Antony Blinken publicly announced the end of Trump-era sanctions and visa restrictions on ICC personnel.

Despite the Democratic administration’s claims to support the so-called “rules-based international order,” the Biden White House is now also intimidating the ICC staff — if only a little more quietly and less extravagantly than Trump and the Republicans have done .

The Biden administration is furiously resisting any attempt to hold Israeli officials accountable for the war crimes they committed in Gaza, with American weapons and political support.

This shows Washington’s deep double standards, as Biden himself had praised the ICC for issuing an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2023.

Secretary of State Blinken urged ICC member states to arrest Putin if he entered their territory. But a year later, he is aggressively pressuring the ICC to prevent it from indicting Israeli officials.

The US and Israel supported Karim Khan as ICC prosecutor

Ironically, it was the US and Israel that had done so lobbied for the election of Karim Khan as an ICC prosecutor.

This is despite the fact that the US and Israel are not states party to the Rome Statute, and therefore are not members of the ICC.

Khan was widely criticized when he came to power in 2021 and immediately stopped investigating war crimes committed by US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

But seven months after Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, the ICC is facing global condemnation for its inaction in the face of what UN experts say is clearly a genocide.

Until 2016, only Africans were tried at the ICC for the worst crimes. This led the leaders of the Global South to denounce the ICC as a colonial institution.

Khan is forced to act if he hopes to save face and the ICC’s legitimacy.

His former sponsors in the US and Israel have therefore turned against him.

Not only justice for the Palestinian people, but also the reputation of the court itself is at stake.

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