Karim Khan’s War on Israel

With Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, the story gets worse and worse. We already know that he was hoping to divert attention from the allegations of rape brought against him by one of his assistants. That’s why immediately after charges were made, he cancelled a long-planned fact-finding trip to Israel, and promptly issued the arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. He then told his rape accuser that she should withdraw her charge, because if it were made public, it would damage him, and therefore his case against Israel, and she, a good Muslim, wouldn’t want that, would she? He also was counting on the Muslim states to rally round him, out of the same desire to protect him and his “important work” against Israel. Now a senior diplomat confirms that all along, Karim Khan had hoped to use the furor over the arrest warrants to lessen Western support for Israel. More on this latest revelation can be found here: “ICC prosecutor issued warrants for Netanyahu to make West ‘turn against Israel’ – exclusive,” by Jotam Confino, Jerusalem Post, May 13, 2025:

Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, hoped that issuing arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant would make the West turn against Israel, a senior Western diplomat with firsthand knowledge of the ICC case has told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview.

The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that he believed Khan’s decision to issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders was based on a combination of a desire to see powerful, Western nations turn against Israel and inspire public pressure from pro-Palestinian groups.

He recalled a conversation he had with Khan last year, where Khan allegedly said: “You just wait and see. If I apply for warrants against Netanyahu, this would give countries like Germany and Canada the excuse they need to turn against the Israeli government.”

“I remember thinking to myself first: How naive can you be?” the diplomat said.

“But secondly, I thought: That’s not the job. You should be driven by the law and by facts and evidence, not by the thought that Germany might turn on an elected official,” the diplomat said.

Prior to the October 7 massacre, Khan was not seen as a champion of Palestinian rights.

In late 2023, when the war between Israel and Hamas was at its peak, a campaign against Khan kicked off, led by the BDS movement and pro-Palestinian NGOs and activists who went after him for not clamping down on Israeli officials for alleged war crimes.

The BDS movement called Khan a “genocide enabler,” demanding that he be fired and replaced with someone who would go after Israel….

Worried about losing his job because of pressure from pro-Palestinian groups, Karim Khan turned from someone indifferent to the “cause of Palestine” to a paladin of the cause.

Israel also reacted fiercely to the surprise announcement, with Netanyahu accusing the ICC of antisemitism and comparing the case to a “modern [Alfred] Dreyfus trial.”

Netanyahu said that the decision was made by a “corrupt chief prosecutor trying to save his own skin from the serious charges against him for sexual harassment, and by biased judges motivated by antisemitic hatred of Israel.”

Hamas also rejected the arrest warrants for its top leaders, Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh. Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh, however, killed by Israel earlier that year in Gaza and Tehran, respectively, and the requests for arrest warrants were withdrawn when their deaths were confirmed.

Since then, several Western countries have said they would not enforce the arrest warrants if Netanyahu or Gallant arrived on their soil, including France, Poland, Austria, the US, Argentina, Hungary, Italy, and Germany….

These countries that have declared they will not enforce the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant understood that Karim Khan had never given Israel a chance to be interviewed by him. In fact, he was rushing, after the rape charges were first made by his assistant, to use the arrest warrants as a way to do three things: first, distract attention from those charges and focus on the furor that the arrest warrants would undoubtedly cause; two, appeal to the woman he had raped to drop her charge which would harm not just Karim Khan, but the Palestinian cause, a cause that she, as a Muslim, supported; third, he knew that issuing those arrest warrants would assure him of support from Muslim states at a time when he would be under pressure, because of the rape charge, to resign.

Now we know Karim Khan wasn’t just intent on saving himself. He had admitted to a “senior Western diplomat” that he intended to use the arrest warrants as a way to turn the West against Israel.

Karim Khan’s plans have now all been laid bare. Others abide our question, but thou, Karim Khan, art free. How come? What in god’s name, we want to know, is keeping the ICC from firing Karim Khan?