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ICC Prosecutor Wants to Rob Israel of Its Legitimate Right to Self Dense
On Monday, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan KC sought arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
Members of Congress from both parties have quickly condemned this action from ICC. Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres (NY) said:
The decision to seek arrest warrants is not law but politics. It is not justice but rather 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.
Today’s decision in effect 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.
Republican Representative Elise Stefanik (NY) said, “The ICC is an illegitimate court that [equates] a peaceful nation protecting its right to exist with radical terror groups that commit genocide.” International legal expert Eugene Kontorovich explained that, “Diplomatically, it is an attempt to create moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel.”
As will be discussed below, the ICC prosecutor’s factual allegations have no basis. Indeed, Israel’s enemies have sought to use the ICC against it long before the October 7 war began. The recent actions of the ICC prosecutor merely highlight that Court’s illegitimacy and the way that the Jewish State is persecuted in international forums that are functionally controlled by Israel’s enemies.
Like most intergovernmental institutions, the ICC is the subject of the political whims of the undemocratic majority of states. Its very founding document, the Rome Statute, was even altered at the demand of Arab and Islamic states in order to invent a new “war crime” aimed at criminalizing Israeli settlements.
This weaponization of the ICC against the Jewish state is now on full display. Just in order to claim jurisdiction over Israel — which is not a party to the Rome Statute –the ICC had to invent two legal fantasies: (1) it had to pretend that the Palestine Liberation Organization is actually a “state,” and (2) it had to pretend that a treaty can bind actual states that never signed onto the treaty.
To justify these fictions, the ICC relied in large part on the meaningless, non-binding, and political recommendations of the same body that once declared “Zionism is a form of racism.” It did so all while ignoring actual international law that clearly articulates the criteria for statehood, of which the PLO undeniably falls short.
Monday’s actions by the Prosecutor threaten not only Israel. They amounts to a power grab, in which Prosecutor Karim Khan has decided his judgment supersedes that of democratic governments.
The ICC, according to its own rules, is meant to act only as a court of last resort; that is, the ICC is only supposed to get involved when a state is unable or unwilling to investigate allegations itself. This is a high bar for a prosecutor. Israel has one of the most robust and independent judicial systems in the world, including its highly respected Supreme Court. The IDF itself maintains arguably the most professional and independent system of legal advisors and reviewers, who regularly take on incidents for investigation and prosecution.
If Israel’s independent and professional legal system isn’t sufficient for Khan, then no legal system is. This would open all democracies engaged in self-defense to lawfare waged by bad actors and second guessing by a rogue prosecutor, including, potentially, the US.
The allegations against Netanyahu and Gallant are factually baseless. The first is “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the [Rome] Statute.”
As international law expert Eugene Kontorovich explained early in the war, “siege is a ‘legitimate’ and ordinary part of lawful war … An army need not help its enemy obtain provisions during a conflict. When military objectives and civilians are intermingled, siege aimed at the former also will affect the latter. As with other situations of collateral damage to civilians, international law permits a siege as long as it isn’t ‘for the purpose of denying sustenance to the civilian population.’ There is no indication that Israel has any strategy of starving out civilians.”
Despite the legality of such a siege, beginning on October 18 — only 11 days after Hamas’ barbaric attack, as the full reality of how many people had been killed and how many taken hostage was still being absorbed — Israel agreed to allow aid into Gaza and has allowed sufficient aid in ever since. Israel also restarted supplying Gaza with water on October 15.
While there may have been isolated cases of individuals with underlying medical problems being malnourished, and certainly Hamas obstructs distribution of food aid, there is no wide-scale starvation occurring.
The Gaza Ministry of Health claims that since the start of the war, 32 individuals have died of malnutrition and dehydration, or .0015 percent of the population. Of course no one wants anyone, in Gaza or elsewhere, to die of starvation, but to put this in perspective, this does not come close to comparing with places in which actual famines have occurred, and rather is at about the same level as France.
A senior Israeli defense official told The Jerusalem Post, “most of the food that Israel has been sending into the Strip has ‘immediately been taken by Hamas terrorists, who then sell some of the supplies for ten times more than what it’s worth,’” and a former senior Israeli defense official told the Post, “there is no food shortage in Gaza; there are those who are hungry since Hamas has taken all of the food and they don’t have enough money to pay Hamas on the black market.” This tactic serves a dual purpose for Hamas: it enriches the terror group while providing the fodder exactly for ICC allegations like this one.
In particular, in light of last week’s discovery of 50 cross-border tunnels from Rafah into Egypt, which certainly could have been used to bring in food as easily as any other materials had that been necessary, blaming Israel for any difficulty in food distribution simply doesn’t hold up to the facts. If in fact the population was starving, why didn’t they bring in food through those cross-border tunnels?
The ICC Prosecutor has also made allegations of “Willfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health contrary to article 8(2)(a)(iii), or cruel treatment as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i); Wilful killing contrary to article 8(2)(a)(i), or Murder as a war crime contrary to article 8(2)(c)(i); Intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as a war crime contrary to articles 8(2)(b)(i), or 8(2)(e)(i); Extermination and/or murder contrary to articles 7(1)(b) and 7(1)(a), including in the context of deaths caused by starvation, as a crime against humanity.”
Multiple legal experts have attested to the fact that Israel uses all means possible to avoid harm to civilians. Just last week, John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies with the Modern War Institute at West Point, told CNN, “I can say with very strong confidence that Israel has done everything the US military has ever done in the history of urban combat and things that we’ve never done, implementing every civilian harm mitigation technique that has been developed in the last 30 years despite Hamas’ tactics.”
And Brigadier General (Ret) Mark Kimmitt, former Assistant Secretary of State for political-military affairs and deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, has detailed the “extensive procedures the IDF uses to enforce tough standards aimed at minimizing civilian deaths and protecting infrastructure.”
The remaining allegations, “Persecution as a crime against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(h); Other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity contrary to article 7(1)(k),” are too vague to be meaningful.
Hamas is still holding about 129 hostages, including a one-year old baby, and its unknown how many are dead and how many are living. Yet, the ICC prosecutor seeks to tie Israel’s hands to prevent it from taking the necessary actions to recover them.
On October 7, Israel was attacked with a barbarity not seen since medieval times. It is fighting this war, not by choice, but out of necessity for its survival. To have its defensive war characterized in this manner, as “extermination” or “murder” and used to justify international legal action against its leaders, is to twist morality on its head in the cruelest possible way.
In any war, there will be civilian casualties. But extrapolating from the existence of civilian casualties that Israel has “willfully” caused more suffering or death than necessary to achieve its lawful military aims, or that it has intentionally directed attacks against civilians, is to characterize any war that Israel fights as a genocide or a war crime and to effectively rob it of its legitimate right to self-defense.
Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis. David Litman is a Research Analyst at CAMERA. A version of this article appeared on the CAMERA website.
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Palestinian Authority’s Abbas Offers to Work With Trump to Broker Peace Deal With Israel
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas holds a leadership meeting in Ramallah, in the West Bank, April 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has offered to work with US President Donald Trump to broker a comprehensive peace deal with Israel, praising the American leader for brokering a ceasefire between the Jewish state and Iran and calling for an end to the war in Gaza.
In a letter sent to Trump, Abbas expressed his “deep gratitude and appreciation for [Trump’s] successful efforts in reaching a ceasefire between Israel and Iran,” the official Palestinian Authority (PA) news agency WAFA reported.
After 12 days of conflict between the two Middle Eastern adversaries, Trump announced a “complete and total” ceasefire on Monday, just hours after Iran launched missile strikes on the Al Udeid US airbase in Qatar in retaliation for American attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend.
The US joined Israel’s airstrike campaign against the Islamist regime by launching a large-scale military strike against Tehran, destroying three key nuclear enrichment facilities, including the heavily fortified Fordow site.
Although the fragile ceasefire appears to have since held, Tehran initially broke it within minutes, with Israeli officials reporting that three Iranian missiles were launched within the first three hours of the truce.
In his letter to Trump, Abbas called the ceasefire a “necessary and important step to defuse the crises plaguing the world, which will have a positive impact on the security and stability of the region.” He then turned his attention to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“A ceasefire in Gaza would constitute an additional step to [Trump’s] crucial efforts to achieve a just and comprehensive peace between the Palestinians, the Israelis, and the entire world,” the Palestinian leader wrote.
In an effort to earn trust within the international community, Abbas expressed his willingness to work with Trump, Saudi Arabia, and other global partners “to fulfill the promise of peace.”
The Palestinian leader said he was ready “to immediately negotiate and implement a comprehensive peace agreement within a clear and binding timeframe that ends the occupation and achieves security and stability for all, a just and lasting peace.”
Although Trump attempted a peace deal with the PA during his first term, he ultimately bypassed it and instead pursued the Abraham Accords — a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries.
“With you, we can achieve what seemed impossible: a recognized, free, sovereign, and secure Palestine; a recognized and secure Israel; and a region that enjoys peace, prosperity, and integration,” Abbas wrote in his letter.
Given the PA’s long-standing lack of credibility and widely known support for terrorism against Israel, Abbas has been making promises of change as he seeks to secure international trust and position the PA to play a leading role in the Gaza Strip once the current Israel-Hamas war ends.
The PA, which has long been riddled with accusations of corruption, has also maintained for years a so-called “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for carrying out attacks against Israelis.
Under this policy, the PA Martyr’s Fund makes official payments to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, the families of “martyrs” killed in attacks on Israelis, and injured Palestinian terrorists. Reports estimate that approximately 8 percent of the PA’s budget is allocated to paying stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.
Earlier this year, Abbas announced plans to reform the system, but the PA has continued issuing payments, with top officials stating they will not deduct any of the funds.
Abbas, who was elected to a four-year term in 2005, has also promised to hold elections soon — the first the PA will hold since then.
Even with his commitment to long-promised administrative reforms, the PA lacks public support among Palestinians, with only 40 percent backing its return to govern the Gaza Strip after the war.
Abbas has also promised the demilitarization of his rival Hamas, while condemning the terrorist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — an attack he had previously celebrated.
In the past, Abbas praised Hamas for achieving “important goals” with the Oct. 7 onslaught, describing the attack — the deadliest single-day massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust — as one that “shook the foundations of the Israeli entity.”
Other PA officials, including Mahmoud al-Habbash, Abbas’s adviser on religious and Islamic affairs, have similarly praised Hamas’s atrocities, describing them as “legitimate resistance.”
The post Palestinian Authority’s Abbas Offers to Work With Trump to Broker Peace Deal With Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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New York City Jews Sound Alarm After Anti-Israel Socialist Zohran Mamdani Wins Democratic Mayoral Primary
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
Following Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, local Jewish leaders are expressing deep apprehension about their future status in a city facing the prospect of being led by a man who has been accused of antisemitism and made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career.
Mamdani, the 33‑year‑old state assemblymember and proud democratic socialist, defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other candidates in a lopsided first‑round win in the city’s Democratic primary for mayor, notching approximately 43.5 percent of first‑choice votes compared to Cuomo’s 36.4 percent.
Voters in New York City rank their choices in order of their preference. While Mamdani declared victory and Cuomo conceded defeat, the race’s ultimate outcome will technically be decided when every vote is tallied, taking into account the ranked choice count. Mamdani’s victory is all but assured.
Some observers have speculated that Mamdani’s win over an older, high-profile Democrat signifies growing frustration with the party’s status quo and represents a generational change.
The election results have also alarmed members of the local Jewish community, who expressed deep concern over his past criticism of Israel and defense of antisemitic rhetoric.
“Mamdani’s election is the greatest existential threat to a metropolitan Jewish population since the election of the notorious antisemite Karl Lueger in Vienna,” Rabbi Marc Schneier, one of the most prominent Jewish leaders in New York City, said in a statement. “Jewish leaders must come together as a united force to prevent a mass Jewish Exodus from New York City.”
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who along with her husband Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt co-founded the Altneu, an Orthodox synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, suggested that Mamdani’s political ascendance indicates that antisemitism might actually be a political “asset” these days.
“Perhaps soft antisemitism is not a liability for a NYC politician. It’s an asset,” Chizhik-Goldschmidt wrote. “Perhaps New York City is not the city we thought it was.”
Former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who later founded the organization Americans Against Antisemitism, similarly repudiated Mamdani and encouraged New Yorkers to consolidate behind a single candidate to oppose the presumptive Democratic nominee in the general election in November.
“Mamdani has won the Democratic primary,” he said in a video posted to social media. “It is pathetic, it is sick, it is painful for people who care about the future of New York and in particular the Jewish community.”
Hikind added in a written post accompanying the video: “NYC must unite to defeat the dangerous antisemite Mamdani.”
A little-known politician before this year’s primary campaign, Mamdani is an outspoken supporter of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.
Mamdani has also repeatedly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, falsely suggesting the country does not offer “equal rights” for all its citizens, and promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visits New York.
Most recently, Mamdani defended the phrase “globalize the intifada”— which references previous periods of sustained Palestinian terrorism against Jews and Israels and has been widely interpreted as a call to expand political violence — by invoking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during World War II. In response, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum repudiated the mayoral candidate, calling his comments “outrageous and especially offensive to [Holocaust] survivors.”
The same week, an old X/Twitter post from 2015 by Mamdani resurfaced online showing him appearing to threaten that a “third intifada” was coming.
New York City, which is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, has experienced a major spike in antisemitic incidents since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, with police data showing Jews were targeted in the majority of hate crimes perpetrated in New York City last year.
Concern among Jewish leaders over Mamdani’s victory amid rising antisemitism extended well beyond New York.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, warned that Mamdani’s victory represents a well-known pattern that starts with hatred of Israel and ends with violence targeting Jews.
“Zohran Mamdani’s win in #NYC feels deeply familiar to #Europe’s #Jewish community. We’ve seen where radical politics — especially cloaked in ‘justice’ rhetoric — can lead. It starts with slogans. It ends with violence,” Goldschmidt, the former chief rabbi of Moscow, posted on social media.
“In Europe, we’ve learned the hard way: when far-left ideologues and radical Islamists turn Israel into a symbol of absolute evil, it quickly becomes a weapon — not against a state, but against Jews. ‘Anti-Zionism’ becomes the mask. Exclusion and incitement follow,” the rabbi continued. “This isn’t about legitimate critique of Israeli policy. It’s about obsession. Israel becomes a dog whistle — a coded target on synagogues, schools, and Jews in public life.”
Europe, like New York, has experienced a surge in antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, with antisemitic incidents often liked to animus against Israel.
“The safety of all New Yorkers — including Jewish New Yorkers — is the single greatest responsibility of the mayor of New York,” said Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union.
“That safety has been deeply impacted by the rhetoric and actions of those whose opposition to Zionism has driven them to work to instill fear and intimidation in Jews who support Israel,” he added.
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), called for Jews in New York to immigrate to Israel.
“As an American Jew and as a human, I am truly frightened that an antisemitic communist Mamdani has actually promoted murdering Jews by supporting and legitimizing the antisemitic rally cry ‘globalize the intifada,’ refuses to accept the Jewish state of Israel as a Jewish state, states he will arrest PM Netanyahu if he comes to NYC, and is friendly with Israel bashing Jew-haters – and yet has been mainstreamed in the most important Jewish city in America,” he posted. “Is it time to make aliyah to Israel.”
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Jewish Teen Threatened at Knifepoint in France Amid Surge in Antisemitic Attacks
Sign reading “+1000% of Antisemitic Acts: These Are Not Just Numbers” during a march against antisemitism, in Lyon, France, June 25, 2024. Photo: Romain Costaseca / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
A Jewish teenager was threatened at knifepoint and called a “dirty Jew” in an antisemitic attack in France — the latest in a growing wave of hate crimes targeting the country’s Jewish community.
Last week, a 15-year-old boy was violently attacked in Colomiers, southwestern France, after attending a meetup arranged with a girl over social media, French media reported.
When the boy arrived at the meeting point, two men were waiting for him at the entrance to a basement. They held him at knifepoint, humiliated him, and shared the assault on social media.
One of the attackers, armed with a knife, forced him to remove his shirt and dance, then grabbed him by the neck and forced him to kneel.
Then, the attacker reportedly told him to “beg and pray,” repeatedly calling him a “dirty Jew” because he attended a private Jewish school. He also threatened to kill him if he tried to contact the police.
The following day, the teenager found out that the assault had been filmed and circulated on social media. Using the attackers’ TikTok accounts, the victim was able to file a formal complaint.
On Friday, local police arrested one of the suspects who posted the video, according to the French broadcaster Europe 1. He was taken into custody on charges of aggravated assault motivated by religious hatred.
As of this week, the investigation is ongoing, with authorities actively searching for the remaining suspects.
The brutal assault is the latest antisemitic incident amid a troubling surge in anti-Jewish violence sweeping the country since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Antisemitism in France continued to surge to alarming levels across the country last year, with 1,570 incidents recorded, according to a report by the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF) – the main representative body of French Jews.
The total number of antisemitic outrages in 2024 was a slight dip from 2023’s record total of 1,676, but it marked a striking increase from the 436 antisemitic acts recorded in 2022.
In late May and early June, antisemitic acts rose by more than 140 percent, far surpassing the weekly average of slightly more than 30 incidents.
The report also found that 65.2 percent of antisemitic acts last year targeted individuals, with more than 10 percent of these offenses involving physical violence.
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