The ICC is carrying out the whims of unaccountable UN bodies and NGOs

The issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyau and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reflects a long-standard pattern of international courts relying on unverified and politically motivated misinformation from biased UN agencies and NGOs. This flawed foundation not only has tremendous geo-political and national security implications, but may serve to bring down the International Criminal Court (ICC) itself.

On 21 November, the ICC’s Pre Trial Chamber (PTC) granted Prosecutor Karim Khan KC’s request for warrants against the Israeli Prime Minister and former Defense Minister, accusing the two leaders of the “war crime of starvation” and “crimes against humanity for murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.” The outrageousness of these charges cannot be overstated.

On October 7, Israel suffered a catastrophic invasion where 1,200 people were murdered, thousands tortured and injured, hundreds of thousands internally displaced, and 250 taken hostage to enemy territory. Since then, the Jewish State has been forced to fight an existential war on seven fronts, while also suffering hundreds of daily missile and drone assaults on its towns and cities.

Alongside this military aggression, Israel has also been facing an information warfare campaign the likes of which few have seen. In this part of the war, there has been a mass mobilization of the entire UN apparatus and NGO industry, in conjunction with global civic disruptions and antisemitic attacks organized by Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Palestinian terrorist operatives.

For 18 years, the international community, UN agencies, and dozens of “humanitarian aid” NGOs looked the other way while Hamas turned the entire territory of Gaza into a military fortification, building a tunnel network more extensive than the London Tube, and the placing of weapons, fighters, and rocket launchers in almost every civilian building in the territory. And yet, beginning on October 7, these actors began issuing threats and placing hysterical and impossible demands on Israel to hamper its response to a disaster for which they share significant responsibility.

Nevertheless, Israel has gone over and above what is required by international law to address the humanitarian needs of the Gazan population. These measures include advance evacuation notices; creating joint task forces with the humanitarian community; facilitating the delivery of millions of tons of food, water, and shelter materials; creating humanitarian corridors; enacting tactical pauses; and assisting the vaccination of hundreds of thousands of children against polio. These extensive measures were implemented even as hostile UN and NGO actors spread disinformation on social media, actively campaigned against moving civilians to safer locations, and blamed Israel for their own logistical failures. No country in history facing these incredible challenges has done more to balance civilian protection with the need to achieve imperative military goals.

And yet, all of this was ignored by the ICC. Not only were these measures deemed inadequate by the PTC, but they were claimed to be part of a deliberate campaign of “starvation” and “murder”.

This narrative can be directly traced to lobbying and false and distorted publications issued by NGOs and UN bodies. Some of these groups even have ties to Hamas and the PFLP terrorist organization. Already beginning on October 9, 2023, and before Israel had begun its military incursion, anti-Israel NGOs were accusing Israel of engaging in a policy to deliberately starve Gazans. A March 2024 report by the Famine Review Committee of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, apparently heavily relied upon by the Prosecutor, projected imminent famine in Gaza and thousands of deaths. Not only were myriad methodological failings found in the report, including the significant undercounting of aid, but the IPC itself later rejected its own findings.

Similarly, the IPC reports and other UN bodies relied on flawed data that came from UNRWA and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). For instance, OCHA’s data on humanitarian aid entering Gaza was based solely on numbers provided by UNRWA and excluded the amount of aid provided by other organizations and through crossings not used by this UN agency.

Similarly, OCHA’s casualty data is sourced to Gaza’s “Ministry of Health” (aka Hamas). OCHA does not and cannot verify these figures, and makes no distinction between civilian and combatant deaths when presenting the data on its website. Its conflation of fighters with civilians deliberately manipulates how the casualty data is viewed. In May, OCHA was forced to drastically revise its figures, reducing the reported number of women and children killed by 50%, a move which should have raised immediate red flags in the ICC Prosecutor's office about the reliability of its information.

Under the ICC’s rules, Khan is obligated to disclose exculpatory evidence to the Court such as that mentioned above, but we do not know if he did so in his applications to the Court. Khan’s May 2024 statement announcing the application for the warrants, which ignored Hamas destruction of humanitarian aid crossings on October 7 and repeated claims emanating from the debunked IPC report, suggests he did not.

For years, unverified and non-credible publications issued by the UN and NGOs have dominated narratives regarding the conflict and have been used to impose ever increasing and preposterous legal standards on Israel and Western countries that are committed to observing international humanitarian law. International institutions that are supposed to serve as sober and responsible actors should act as a check on the excess demands of radical activists and mediate with states to instead develop realistic and pragmatic policies.

The ICC has not fulfilled this mandate. Set up as an ostensibly independent institution which was supposed to be insulated from such politicized influence, the ICC was meant to stand in as a last resort court to try international crimes in very specific circumstances. It was not designed to be a vehicle to carry out the political whims of unaccountable UN bodies and NGOs, with which it is now increasingly tied. The non-transparent cooperation agreements with UN bodies and NGOs, secret meetings and NGO lobbying, and the over-reliance on UN and NGO reporting, among many other questionable practices, have significantly degraded the Court.

The issuance of the warrants against Israeli officials has placed these fundamental problems at the Court in stark relief. By limiting the availability of Israeli officials to travel to Europe and other ICC member states, and hampering information sharing with these counterparts, the warrants are causing major interference to Western security cooperation. This disruption also obstructs the ability by the West to counter threats from Iran, Russia, and global terrorism. The trouble caused by the Court is so serious that the US Congress is already working on implementing mass sanctions on those involved, and threatening to crush the economies of those allies who help the Court.

The failure by the ICC to exercise more discretion in its choice of source material may turn out to be the very thing that leads the Court out of existence.

Anne Herzberg is the Legal Advisor of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research organization. She was a co-author of amicus briefs to the Court in this matter in 2020 and in 2024