It came as a shock, if not a surprise. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague is seeking arrest warrants, on accusations of war crimes, for not only three commanders of Hamas but also two leaders of Israel, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Outrageous,” said U.S. President Joe Biden, speaking for almost everybody in Israel and many in Washington. But if the U.S. now scorns the court it helped create in the 1990s, it will undermine the international regime of law and order that it claims to defend.
The request by Karim Khan, the prosecutor, next goes to a panel of independent judges. Even if they issue the warrants, there’s little risk of anybody on the list ever being arrested. For a start, neither the U.S. nor Israel is a signatory to the Rome Statute that established the ICC, and neither feels bound by it. And in the theoretical event that any of the five were ever tried, they’d be presumed innocent and have their day in court.