WASHINGTON – The International Criminal Court holds arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu. Marco Rubio wants the court dismantled. And this week, Ilhan Omar walked into the House of Representatives and introduced a resolution calling for the United States to join it.
The collision of those three facts encapsulates the central argument in American politics over accountability for Gaza. The court that charged Israel’s prime minister with war crimes and crimes against humanity is, in Omar’s view, the most credible mechanism for international justice that exists. Rubio has called it a weapon aimed at American sovereignty and vowed to tear it down “brick by brick.”
Omar’s measure calls on Congress to ratify the Rome Statute, the ICC’s foundational treaty, making the United States a full member of the court for the first time in its history. The resolution also demands the Trump administration lift the sanctions it has imposed on ICC prosecutors, judges, and organizations that work alongside the court, a campaign Rubio escalated last week when he announced a “whole-of-government response to systematically disable” the tribunal.
“If we truly believe in human rights and the rule of law, we should strengthen international justice, not undermine it,” Omar said in introducing the measure, Al Jazeera reported. “The ICC is a crucial tool for justice when victims have nowhere else to turn.”
Rubio offered the opposing formulation that same week. The court, he said, is “waging a war against our country, not with bullets or missiles, but with statutes, compacts, and the force of so-called international law.” The corollary: “If they believe they can deprive us of our sovereignty, we will teach them the full meaning of American resolve.”
The “whole-of-government” approach Rubio described involves pressuring US military and law enforcement partners to formally reject ICC jurisdiction over American personnel, reviewing foreign assistance to countries that continue cooperating with the court, and imposing enhanced sanctions on ICC staff and supporting organizations. Two American advocacy groups have already filed suit against the administration, arguing those sanctions penalize constitutionally protected support for international legal institutions.
The ICC’s relevance to this argument is direct. The court’s Pre-Trial Chamber issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024, finding reasonable grounds to believe both bore individual criminal responsibility for using starvation as a weapon of war, directing attacks against civilian populations, and committing other inhumane acts in Gaza, where Palestinian health authorities report more than 57,000 people have been killed. All 124 signatories to the Rome Statute are legally obligated to detain Netanyahu or Gallant if either man enters their territory.
The United States has never been a Rome Statute member. The Clinton administration signed the treaty in December 2000, but the Senate never ratified it, and the Bush administration formally withdrew the US signature in 2002. Under Trump’s first term, the administration sanctioned the ICC’s chief prosecutor over an investigation into alleged American military abuses in Afghanistan, sanctions Biden reversed on entering office. The current campaign goes further: rather than resisting a specific probe, Rubio has described the goal as disabling the institution itself.
Omar’s resolution does not change the arithmetic. Republicans control the House, no Republican has endorsed the measure, and the administration that has spent months dismantling the ICC’s operational capacity will not sign legislation bringing the United States into it. The measure functions less as a legislative vehicle than as a position statement: a formal declaration, from within the chamber, that at least some members of Congress want the court to survive and the United States inside it.
What gives the resolution political weight is context. Multiple UN experts have concluded that Israel’s operations in Gaza constitute genocide. The International Court of Justice is separately hearing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. And the ICC’s Gaza investigations have accumulated a documentary record of alleged crimes that no pressure campaign can erase from the court’s files, even if it succeeds in hollowing out the tribunal’s enforcement capacity.
The administration’s approach to that record has been to attack the institutional messenger. When Rubio moved last year to sanction Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, over her calls for ICC investigations into Israeli leaders and her characterization of Gaza’s destruction as genocide, the move drew condemnation from rights organizations and European diplomats who saw it as an effort to suppress independent UN oversight. Albanese described it as “mafia style intimidation.”
The administration’s leverage against the ICC is real but finite. European governments that have funded and hosted the court for more than two decades have not indicated any intention to withdraw from the Rome Statute despite Rubio’s warnings. Russia’s withdrawal following the 2023 arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin did not destroy the court. American diplomatic reach exceeds Russia’s by a considerable measure, but the ICC was specifically designed to outlast pressure campaigns by any single government, including the most powerful one.
What neither Omar nor Rubio can immediately resolve is the gap at the center of the argument: the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant remain unexecuted and will stay that way as long as neither man travels to a country willing to enforce them. Omar’s resolution would not change that in the short term. Rubio’s dismantlement campaign does not erase the warrants from the court’s docket. For the families of the more than 57,000 killed in Gaza, both the resolution and the campaign to dismantle the court that recorded their deaths are arguments conducted at a considerable remove from consequence.
