NEW YORK – US lawmakers condemned the International Criminal Court’s request to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant along with top Hamas leaders on charges against humanity in the Gaza war, some calling for the US to levy sanctions against the court.
While most Democrats were largely silent on the ICC, centrist-leaning Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) slammed the ICC for drawing equivalences between the leaders of Hamas and the government of Israel.
“Requesting arrest warrants for both Israel and Hamas leaders suggests there is a moral equivalence between them – there is none and it’s disgusting to suggest otherwise. The ICC’s credibility is now in shambles and they have only themselves to thank,” Fetterman said in a post on X.
In a statement, Torres called the decision to seek arrest warrants “not law but politics” as the ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel, adding it’s not “justice but rather a retribution against Israel for the original sin of existing as a Jewish State and the subsequent sin of defending itself amid the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”
According to Torres, the ICC’s decision makes it criminal for a state like Israel to defend itself against an enemy “shrewd enough to embed itself in a civilian population, as Hamas has done to an extent never seen before in the history of warfare.”
“But for October 7 and Hamas’s unprecedented militarization of its own civilian population and infrastructure, there would be no war in Gaza and no humanitarian crisis among Gazans,” Torres said. “Hamas is the cause of everything tragic that has ensued and Hamas alone should be the target of criminal prosecution.”
On X, Wasserman-Shultz said there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
“Equating a democratic state with a terror group that rapes, murders, delights in acts of genocide & maximizes civilian deaths demonstrates the ICC’s gaping moral failure,” she said. “No other nation is held to this standard. #NeverAgainisNow.”
Few progressive Democrats comment on warrant request
Only a few of the Democratic Party’s most progressive members immediately commented on the ICC’s warrants request.
Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan, a staunch Palestinian activist and AIPAC critic, said he’d be “more than glad” to show the ICC the way to the House floor to issue its warrant if Netanyahu came to address Congress.
“Ditto for Hamas leader,” Pocan said. “Ceasefire. No offensive weapons. Food, water & medicine must get through.”Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) trod more carefully in her response to the ICC.
“It is crucial here that we recall that the ICC operates under the principle of complementarity, meaning that it does not have jurisdiction when States demonstrate both the ability and the willingness to conduct their own independent and impartial investigations,” Omar said. “A credible domestic process that can hold perpetrators to account remains preferable to international tribunals. I strongly encourage Israeli and Palestinian authorities to consider that path.”
Omar noted that while the US never joined the ICC, it has frequently supported its work under administrations from both parties.
“Both the Bush Administration, in the case of Darfur, and the Obama Administration, in the case of Libya, understood the importance of the ICC’s work, even in cases where the country in question was not a state party,” she added.