President Joe Biden’s administration plans to “look at the appropriate steps” to retaliate against the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants for Israel‘s leaders, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
“We want to work with you on a bipartisan basis to find an appropriate response,” Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
U.S. and Israeli officials have condemned ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan’s indictment of Israeli leaders on procedural and moral grounds. In dialogue with a senior Republican lawmaker, Blinken’s statement implied that Biden’s team could reconsider their previous reversal of the imposition of sanctions on court officials during Donald Trump’s presidency.
“From our perspective, going back, in lifting sanctions that were previously implemented, the intent, the purpose was to find the best way to protect our service members who served in Afghanistan,” Blinken told Sen. James Risch (R-ID), the top Republican on the committee. “And we believe that we did that. But, given the events of yesterday, I think we have to look at the appropriate steps to take to deal with, again, what is a profoundly wrongheaded decision.”
Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza has attracted criticism on humanitarian grounds from the earliest days of the conflict, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials have deflected by emphasizing that Hamas uses human shields. Biden and other U.S. officials have gradually increased their public remonstrances of Israel, while Blinken also has faulted international observers for neglecting to censure Hamas — a pair of controversies that came to a new head on Monday when the ICC unveiled allegations of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” aimed, in one document, at Hamas chiefs, Netanyahu, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
“We reject the Prosecutor’s equivalence of Israel with Hamas. It is shameful,” Blinken said on Monday. “Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization that carried out the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and is still holding dozens of innocent people hostage, including Americans.”
Khan, the chief prosecutor, justified the dual indictments on the grounds that “if we do not demonstrate our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as being applied selectively, we will be creating the conditions for its collapse.” Blinken, for his part, argued separately that the nature of the conflict in Gaza makes those assessments uniquely difficult.
“It’s very difficult to make final determinations in the midst of a war when we do not have access on the ground,” he said. “And when you have an almost totally unique battlefield, where an enemy — a terrorist organization, Hamas — is hiding behind and underneath civilians and apartment buildings, in mosques, in schools, and firing at the Israeli forces. So we’re determined to make every appropriate determination.”
U.S. officials countered that Khan had “short-circuit[ed]” his own investigation through an abrupt public announcement, at the expense of previously scheduled meetings with Israeli officials.
“In fact, the prosecutor himself was scheduled to visit Israel as early as next week to discuss the investigation and hear from the Israeli Government,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Monday. “The prosecutor’s staff was supposed to land in Israel today to coordinate the visit, and instead, Israel was informed that the prosecutor’s staff didn’t get on their flight around the same time that the prosecutor himself went on television to announce these charges. These circumstances call into question the legitimacy and credibility of this investigation.”
It’s not the first high-profile dispute between U.S. and ICC officials. Trump’s administration imposed sanctions and visa restrictions on ICC officials in 2020, as part of a dispute over ICC investigations into U.S. military personnel deployed in Afghanistan. Blinken lifted those sanctions in 2021, but Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate have drafted legislation to impose them again.
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“There’s a number of us up here that are working on a legislative approach to this, that includes not only the Afghanistan question, but also includes the question of the ICC sticking its nose in the business of countries that have an independent legitimate, democratic judicial system,” Risch said. “And, obviously they violated that yesterday. Can you support this? The devil’s in the details, obviously, in the legislation, but do you think you can support a legislative approach to this?”
Blinken was encouraging but noncommittal. “As you say, the devil’s in the details, so let’s see what what you got,” he said.