US House votes to advance bill to punish ICC for Israeli arrest warrants | Donald Trump News

The United States Parliament voted to approve a bill to punish the International Criminal Court (ICC) in retaliation for its arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Legislators in the lower house of the US Congress passed the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” by a large majority, 243 to 140, on Thursday as a sign of strong support for Israel.

Forty-five Democrats joined 198 Republicans in supporting the bill. No Republicans voted against it.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where a Republican majority was sworn in earlier this month.

The law imposes sanctions on any foreign person who assists the ICC in its efforts to investigate, arrest or prosecute a US citizen or a citizen of a federal state that does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction.

Neither the US nor Israel are party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC.

Penalties will include the freezing of assets, and the denial of visas to any foreign nationals who contribute financially or financially to the court’s efforts.

“The United States is passing this law because a kangaroo court wants to arrest the prime minister of our greatest ally, Israel,” Representative Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in his speech before the vote on Thursday.

The vote, the first since the new Congress took office last week, underscored strong support among Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump for the Israeli government, despite the ongoing war in Gaza.

That conflict has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians since it began in October 2023, most of them women and children. United Nations experts have condemned Israel’s methods in Gaza as “relative to the elements of genocide”.

That prompted ICC prosecutors last May to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.

In response, US lawmakers threatened to retaliate against the ICC. In a letter sent to outgoing US President Joe Biden in May, a number of human rights groups urged him to reject calls for action.

“Operating on these calls would seriously harm the interests of all victims around the world and the ability of the US government to fight for human rights and the cause of justice,” the groups wrote at the time.

This week, a group of civil rights groups released another letter ahead of Thursday’s vote, criticizing the House bill as an attack on “a private institution”.

Punishing the court, they wrote, “would jeopardize the ability of desperate victims throughout the court’s investigation to access justice, weaken the credibility of the penal instruments in some cases, and put the United States at odds with its allies”.

The letter warned that imposing “asset freezes and access restrictions” on ICC allies would bring the US “an insult to neutrality in justice”.

Nevertheless, the US Senate, under the leadership of John Thune, has promised the immediate consideration of this act so that Trump can sign it into law after taking office on January 20.

In 2020, during his first term in office, Trump reprimanded the ICC’s top leaders regarding the court’s investigation into US crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in the Palestinian territories. President Biden later lifted those sanctions.

The ICC, based in The Hague, is a permanent court that can prosecute people for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and crimes of torture.

The State of Palestine has been a member since 2015, and the court began announcing an investigation into crimes committed there by Israeli and Hamas officials in 2019.

Although Israel is not a party to the ICC, the court has jurisdiction over crimes committed on the territory of a member state, regardless of the nationality of those committing them.

The US has supported the court at times, for example, when the ICC’s top prosecutor sought an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over war crimes in Ukraine. Russia, like Israel and the US, is not a member of the court.

Karim Khan, the prosecutor who issued the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, said his decision was consistent with the way the court works in all its cases, and pointed out that warrants can prevent further crimes.