ICC judges reject Israel's request to withdraw Netanyahu arrest warrant
Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Wednesday rejected Israel's request to withdraw arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
Israel made the request while the ICC reviews its challenge over the court's jurisdiction to weigh in on its war on Gaza.
The decision, dated 9 July 2025, was published on the ICC website on Wednesday.
The judges also rejected an Israeli request to suspend the court's broader investigation into alleged crimes in the occupied Palestinian Territories.
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Israel argued that the warrants should be withdrawn, citing a decision by appeals judges at the ICC in April that ordered a lower panel to reconsider Israel’s objections about the court's jurisdiction in Gaza.
However, the judges rejected that reasoning, saying that Israel's jurisdictional challenge was still pending and the warrants would remain in place until the court ruled on that issue specifically.
The ICC has come under intense pressure to drop its war crimes probe.
Earlier this month, a senior legal advisor to the US State Department issued a dramatic threat to the court's oversight body, warning that "all options are on the table".
"We will use all appropriate and effective diplomatic, political and legal instruments to block ICC overreach," Reed Rubinstein, the US representative, warned.
The threat came just before the Trump administration announced it was imposing sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN's special rapporteur for Palestine.
The sanctions follow Albanese's scathing report on 30 June, in which she named over 60 companies, including major US technology firms like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, which she said were involved in "the transformation of Israel's economy of occupation to an economy of genocide".
Israel's effort to stop the ICC has, to date, failed to bear fruit.
Middle East Eye revealed on Tuesday that a British-Israeli defence lawyer threatened in May to ''destroy" the British chief prosecutor of the ICC, Karim Khan, unless he withdrew the arrest warrants.
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