In his Yom HaShoah address on Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu responded to reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) might be getting ready to issue arrest warrants for Israeli commanders and politicians. Neither Washington nor Jerusalem recognize ICC jurisdiction in Israel or Gaza, but the court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, believes otherwise. Arsen Ostrovsky and John Spencer explain why going through with a case against Israel would, as Netanyahu put it, leave an “indelible stain” an international law:

The ICC was established in 2002 as “a court of last resort,” with the primary goal of ending impunity for those accused of the most heinous of crimes, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. It was never intended to be applied in the Orwellian circumstances of prosecuting Israeli leaders as they defend the Jewish state against the murderers and rapists of Hamas and seek to bring back hostages held captive by the terror group in Gaza.

The IDF has gone to unprecedented lengths, not seen in the history of modern warfare, to abide by the laws of war and avoid harm to civilians, even when doing so has put the IDF’s own soldiers at risk. This has included warning of impending attacks and creating safe corridors for civilians to evacuate through. They have done this while continuing to facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid and supplies, including more than 25,000 aid trucks to date, notwithstanding Hamas continuing to intercept and syphon much of this aid.

Not only is there absolutely no legal basis to issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, doing so now would only reward Hamas and unleash a further firestorm of anti-Semitism.

The U.S., and indeed all Western allies, cannot stand idly by now as the court is dragged into irredeemable disrepute. This is not the time for quiet, timid diplomacy. It must be made clear, in no uncertain terms, that if Khan chooses to proceed with issuing warrants, it will be the death knell of the court’s very legitimacy.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.