Netanyahu: ICC warrants like charging Roosevelt and Churchill during WWII 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s requests for arrest warrants for himself alongside Hamas officials to charging former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and former United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

“I think these charges are exactly as President Biden called ‘em, they’re outrageous,” Netanyahu said in a Tuesday interview on CNN’s “The Lead” with anchor Jake Tapper. “They’re beyond outrageous. This is a rogue prosecutor that has put false charges, and created false symmetries that are both dangerous and false.”

“The first false symmetry is he equates the democratically-elected leaders of Israel with the terrorist tyrants of Hamas,” Netanyahu continued. “That’s like saying that ‘Well, I’m issuing… arrest warrants for FDR and Churchill, but also for [Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.]’”

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan made requests for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant as well as Hamas leaders Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh Monday. 

Khan has said that Netanyahu and Gallant are criminally responsible for starvation as a method of war, intentionally targeting civilians, extermination and persecution, alongside other war crimes.

Biden went after the ICC prosecutor on Monday for trying to get arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.

“The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous,” Biden said in a statement. “And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence — none — between Israel and Hamas.  We will always stand with Israel against threats to its security.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also criticized the requests, stating that the ICC “was established by its state parties as a court of limited jurisdiction.”

“Those limits are rooted in principles of complementarity, which do not appear to have been applied here amid the Prosecutor’s rush to seek these arrest warrants rather than allowing the Israeli legal system a full and timely opportunity to proceed,” Blinken said in a statement.