US House votes to advance bill to sanction ICC over Israel arrest warrants | Donald Trump News

The United States House of Representatives has voted in favor of a bill to sanction 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.

Lawmakers in the lower house of the US Congress passed the “Illegitimate Court Confrontation Act” by a 243-140 majority on Thursday in a strong show of support for Israel.

Forty-five Democrats joined 198 Republicans in supporting the bill. Not a single Republican voted against it.

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

The legislation proposes sanctions for any alien who assists the ICC in its attempts to investigate, detain, or prosecute an American citizen or a national of an allied country that does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction.

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

Sanctions would include freezing assets, as well as denying visas to all foreigners who materially or financially contribute to the court’s efforts.

“America is passing this law because a kangaroo court is seeking to arrest the prime minister of our great ally, Israel,” Rep. Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a speech before Thursday’s vote.

The vote, one of the first since the new Congress took office last week, showed strong support among President-elect Donald Trump’s Republicans for the Israeli government, despite its ongoing war in Gaza.

The conflict has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians since it began in October 2023, many of them women and children. United Nations experts condemned Israel’s methods in Gaza as “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.”

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

In response, US lawmakers threatened retaliation against the ICC. In a letter sent to outgoing US President Joe Biden in May, dozens of rights groups urged him to reject calls for punitive measures.

“Acting on these calls would seriously harm the interests of all victims globally and the US government’s ability to advocate for human rights and justice,” the group said. wrote at that time.

This week, another group of human rights organizations released another letter ahead of Thursday’s vote, denouncing the bill as an attack on an “independent judicial institution.”

Sanctioning the court, they wrote, “will threaten the ability of desperate victims in all judicial investigations to access justice, weaken the credibility of sanctioned tools in other contexts, and bring the United States into conflict with its closest allies.”

The letter warned that imposing “asset freezes and entry restrictions” on ICC allies would bring the US “the stigma of siding with impunity over justice.”

Despite this, the US Senate, under Majority Leader John Thune, has promised to quickly consider the bill so that Trump can sign it into law after he takes office on January 20.

In 2020, during his first term, Trump sanctioned senior ICC leaders over judicial investigations of US crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory. President Biden later lifted those sanctions.

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

The State of Palestine has been a member since 2015, and the court announced for the first time an investigation into crimes committed there by both 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 who committed them.

The US has occasionally supported the court, for example, when the ICC’s chief prosecutor requested warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Russia, like Israel and the USA, 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 court’s approach in all his cases, and indicated the warrants could prevent ongoing crimes.