The International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a permanent treaty-based tribunal in The Hague, founded to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression when national courts will not or cannot act. It has a genuine record of prosecuting real atrocities, from Congolese warlords who conscripted child soldiers to Vladimir Putin for the wartime abduction of Ukrainian children. It has also opened a case against Israel’s elected leadership on the strength of a contested jurisdictional theory, over the objection of Israel, the United States and dozens of other states, while the original warrant request paired that case with, and treated as morally equivalent, the men who planned the October 7 massacre.

What it is

The ICC was created by the Rome Statute, adopted in 1998 and entered into force on 1 July 2002 once 60 states ratified it. It sits in The Hague, Netherlands, and is legally independent of the United Nations, though the Security Council can refer situations to it. As of 2026 it has roughly 125 states parties. The court has four organs: the Presidency, the judicial divisions (Pre-Trial, Trial and Appeals Chambers), the Office of the Prosecutor, which investigates and brings cases, and the Registry, which handles administration. Its annual budget, funded by assessed contributions from member states, runs around €190 million. Karim Khan KC has served as Chief Prosecutor since 2021, succeeding Fatou Bensouda. Crucially, the United States, Israel, Russia, China and India are not parties to the Rome Statute and do not recognize the court’s jurisdiction over their nationals.

What it has done

The ICC’s docket for its first two decades was dominated by African conflicts. Its first verdict, in 2012, convicted Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga for conscripting child soldiers. It indicted Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir for genocide in Darfur in 2009, a warrant never executed because Bashir traveled freely among non-cooperating states for a decade. It convicted Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen in 2021 and Malian jihadist Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi in 2016 for destroying cultural heritage in Timbuktu. Outside Africa, it issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2023 over the forced deportation of Ukrainian children, and it took former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte into custody in March 2025 over drug-war killings, a case still pending trial. Kenya’s cases against sitting officials collapsed in 2014 to 2016 for lack of cooperating witnesses, a failure the court’s own judges cited publicly.

Israel, Palestine and the 2024 warrants

Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute. The court’s asserted jurisdiction over Israelis rests entirely on the accession of “the State of Palestine,” which the UN General Assembly admitted as the ICC’s 123rd state party in April 2015, over Israeli and American objection that Palestine does not meet the statehood criteria the ICC’s own founding treaty presupposes. A Pre-Trial Chamber ruled in February 2021, by a 2-1 vote, that the court had territorial jurisdiction over Gaza and the West Bank including East Jerusalem; the dissenting judge argued the majority had no basis to resolve a live statehood dispute by fiat. Bensouda opened a formal investigation weeks later.

On 20 May 2024, Khan requested arrest warrants in a single announcement naming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas figures: Yahya Sinwar, Ismail Haniyeh and military commander Mohammed Deif, architect of the October 7 attack under the 1988 Hamas Covenant’s call to destroy Israel. Pairing the request this way drew immediate criticism for equating the democratically elected leadership of a state defending itself with the commanders of a US- and EU-designated terror group that carried out a premeditated massacre. On 21 November 2024, the court issued warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, charging the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity including murder and persecution, not genocide. The warrants for Sinwar, Haniyeh and Deif lapsed after Israel confirmed killing all three in 2024. Israel maintains the court lacks jurisdiction over its nationals and disputes the starvation charge, pointing to the volumes of aid it transited into Gaza throughout the war; see the wiki’s fuller treatment of the Gaza famine claims and the separate question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a charge no ICC warrant has actually brought.

The ICC is a different body from the International Court of Justice, which hears state-versus-state cases like South Africa’s genocide claim against Israel; conflating the two, common in press coverage, obscures that neither has produced a genocide finding against Israel.

The bias record

Of the ICC’s first ten formal investigations, all were in Africa, prompting the African Union in 2013 and again in 2016 to accuse the court of selective, neo-colonial prosecution while ignoring conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. An Afghanistan investigation, authorized in 2020, covered alleged US as well as Taliban conduct; the Trump administration responded by sanctioning then-Prosecutor Bensouda personally, sanctions Biden lifted in 2021. When Khan sought the Netanyahu warrant, the US Congress passed the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act in the House in June 2024, and in 2025 the Trump administration imposed a second round of sanctions, this time on Khan himself and several ICC judges. Hungary hosted Netanyahu on an official visit in April 2025 without arrest and announced its withdrawal from the Rome Statute the same month; Germany, Italy and several other states parties have signaled they would not execute the warrant either, an inconsistency in enforcement the court’s defenders concede undercuts its claim to universal, apolitical law.

The court’s real mandate, and how far this strayed from it

The court’s core function, prosecuting mass atrocity when national systems fail, has produced real convictions with no political constituency defending the accused: child-soldier recruiters, an LRA commander responsible for abductions and sexual slavery, and a Kremlin-ordered child-abduction scheme. That record is why the institution retains credibility to lose. The Israel case is contested precisely because it asks the court to extend that credibility to a jurisdictional theory built on a state that does not, by the Rome Statute’s own terms, plainly exist, applied to a democracy at war with a genocidal terror group whose own leaders it initially sought to charge in the same breath.

The ICJ · Hamas · The October 7 attacks · Who attacked first on October 7 · Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza · Palestinian statehood