Netanyahu Blasts Biden Admin For Rejecting Gop Effort To Sanction Icc

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he’s “surprised and disappointed” that the Biden administration won’t support sanctions on a war crimes court seeking his arrest.

The White House on Tuesday said it would reject the Republican-led congressional effort to reprimand the International Criminal Court after its chief prosecutor filed arrest warrants for Netanyahu, War Cabinet member Yoav Gallant and Hamas leaders. That reversed a previous signal from Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who last week told lawmakers the court’s move was a “profoundly wrong-headed decision” and the administration would work with Congress on potentially imposing sanctions.

Netanyahu blasted the new stance in an interview with Sirius XM’s “The Morgan Ortagus Show” that is set to air Sunday. POLITICO obtained a clip of the interview, which took place Wednesday, ahead of the broadcast.

“The United States said that they would, in fact, back the sanctions bill,” Netanyahu says in the interview. “I thought that was still the American position because there was bipartisan consensus just a few days ago.”

“Now you say there’s a question mark,” he told host Morgan Ortagus, a former spokesperson for the State Department in the Trump administration, “and frankly I’m surprised and disappointed.”

The comments provide fresh evidence of the deepening rift between the Israeli and American leaders, who have differed over how Israel should conduct its war against Hamas in Gaza.

The Biden administration is in talks with Congress on how best to respond to the arrest warrants. Republicans are pushing a sanctions bill while Democrats debate whether or not to sign onto the measure. President Joe Biden initially called the ICC’s decision “outrageous” and said it drew a false equivalence between the actions of a democratic state and a militant group.

Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Chip Roy (R-Texas) earlier this month introduced a bill to sanction the ICC — which targets individuals accused of war crimes, genocide and other international law violations — for investigating and prosecuting U.S. citizens and American allies, including Israel. Calls to pass that measure, or something like it, grew following the court’s announcement, even though the U.S. is not a member of court.

The Stefanik-Roy bill would revoke visas as well as block access to a person’s property in the U.S. It’s unclear if those reprimands or others would feature in a measure that sails through Congress, a tough order now that the president opposes sanctions on the court.

White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre provided the administration’s latest position on Tuesday: “Sanctions on the ICC are not an effective or appropriate tool to address U.S. concerns.” She stressed, however, that the administration would “work with Congress on other options to address the ICC overreach.”

The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the ICC’s former prosecutor, including revoking visas and blocking property access, for investigating alleged war crimes by American troops in Afghanistan and Israelis in Palestinian territories. The U.S. lifted those penalties in 2021, with Blinken calling them “inappropriate and ineffective” at the time.

“The administration seems to have decided that, for all its discomfort with the prosecutor’s choice, it does not want to replicate the Trump approach,” said David Bosco, a professor at Indiana University and author of a book on the ICC. “This is both about optics but probably in part about deep uncertainty that sanctions would do any good.”

In the interview, Netanyahu defended himself against the court’s allegations that he and Israeli authorities purposefully withheld humanitarian aid from entering Gaza since the war began.

“We’re putting in half a million tons of food and medicine into Gaza,” he claimed, saying Israel’s enemies were Hamas militants, not the Palestinian people. “There’s plenty of food there — 3,000 calories per person. That’s almost 1,000 above the standard that is required.”

He also said Israel is going “out of our way” to protect civilians during the war, launched in retaliation for Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 people and saw 250 people taken hostage. Israel sends “millions” of text messages, drops leaflets and makes phone calls to tell civilians to get out of harm’s way.

“These charges are completely false,” he asserted.

For months, aid groups have accused Israel of slowing down the amount of aid that enters the territory, leading to famine-like conditions affecting Gaza’s 2.2 million people. Over the weekend, Israel reportedly dropped a small bomb targeting two Hamas operatives that led to a fire in a displaced persons camp near Rafah, killing at least 45 people and injuring dozens more. Israeli forces now have tanks in the center of the southern Gaza city to eliminate the remaining elements of Hamas’ fighting force there.

Despite the growing civilian toll in Rafah, the Biden administration insisted Tuesday that Israel’s operation wasn’t large enough to cross the president’s “red line” or spark a policy change toward the ally.