Netanyahu blasts Biden admin for rejecting GOP effort to sanction ICC
Previously, the Biden administration signaled it would support a Republican-led congressional move to punish the war crimes 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.”