Julian Borger writes:

The arrest warrants issued by the international criminal court (ICC) represent an earthquake on the world’s legal landscape: the first time a western ally from a modern democracy has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by a global judicial body.

Inside Israel, the warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, will not have an immediate impact. In the short term they are likely to rally support around the prime minister from a defiant Israeli public.

In the longer term, however, the enormity of the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant could grow heavier over time, shrinking the patch on the globe still open to them. The stigma of being an accused war criminal is a hard one to shrug off.

Yahya Sinwar and the other two Hamas suspects named by the ICC prosecutor have all been killed by Israel since May when the warrants were first requested, but the pre-trial chamber at The Hague issued a warrant for one of them, the Hamas military commander Mohammed Diab Ibrahim al-Masri, also known as Mohammed Deif, on the grounds that his widely reported death, in an airstrike in July, has yet to be officially confirmed. That looks like a formality and it is all but certain that none of the three Hamas leaders will stand trial for the 7 October massacres last year that ignited the Gaza war.

In the world as viewed from The Hague, the approval of warrants by the ICC judges will for ever transform the court’s standing. The US – not an ICC member anyway – will react furiously but at a cost to its own international credibility and its remaining claim to stand for global justice.

Other Israeli allies such as Germany will distance themselves (Keir Starmer’s government in the UK can be expected to craft a studiously neutral response), but many countries who have hitherto seen the ICC as a tool of the western world are likely to embrace the decision and the tribunal itself. While the UN security council has done very little to mitigate the war in Gaza, the ICC will be widely seen, especially in the global south, as a more effective defender of the UN charter.

Iva Vukušić, an assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, said: “This set of arrest warrants are groundbreaking because, for the first time in the case of Israel, they involve a close ally of the ‘western’ permanent members of the security council, which have so far been almost exempt from international judicial scrutiny.

“Israel is considered by many as a functioning democracy with a capable judicial system, and a close ally to the west, and we have not so far seen an arrest warrant in such a situation.” [Continue reading…]