The ICC - arrest warrants.

Before the International Criminal Court prosecutor stood in The Hague to request arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, the pressure had already begun to close in—first as background noise, then as something sharper, more explicit, and harder to ignore.

Khan is not new to politics. No ICC prosecutor can be. But what unfolded in the weeks leading up to his decision to seek warrants over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza was, by his telling, something else: a coordinated effort to remind the court where power still resides in a fractured international system.

At the centre of it was Washington. A group of US senators—twelve Republicans—sent a letter that did not bother with diplomatic ambiguity. If the court targeted Israeli leaders, they warned, there would be consequences. Sanctions. Retaliation. The language, reported widely at the time, carried the unmistakable tone of a state that has long refused to recognise the authority of the International Criminal Court over its allies, and often over itself.

Khan later spoke, in unusually candid terms, about another encounter—this one more opaque, but no less revealing. A senior western political figure, he said, told him bluntly that the court was not designed for cases like this. The ICC, the official insisted, existed for “Africa” and for figures like Vladimir Putin—not for leaders

backed by the west. It was a remark that landed with a kind of historical weight, echoing long-standing criticisms that international justice is selectively applied, its reach shaped less by law than by geopolitics.

London, too, hovered in the background. Months later, reports would surface that a senior British official had warned of consequences for the court’s funding and institutional support if the warrants went ahead. The British government has not publicly endorsed such characterisations, but the allegation itself underscored a broader tension: the dependence of international legal bodies on the very states they may be called upon to scrutinise.

For Khan, the question was not whether pressure existed—it clearly did—but whether it could be resisted. In public, he struck a careful balance: acknowledging the political realities without conceding to them. The law, he insisted, must apply equally. If it did not, it would not merely fail—it would expose itself as something less than law.

The warrants themselves, once requested, marked a moment of rupture. Never before had the ICC prosecutor sought to place a sitting Israeli prime minister in the same legal frame as leaders accused of the gravest international crimes. The move triggered immediate backlash. In Washington, officials condemned the court’s action. In Israel, the government dismissed it outright. Allies expressed concern, caution, or quiet unease.

Yet beneath the noise, a more uncomfortable question lingered: what does accountability look like in a world still organised around power?

The ICC was created in the aftermath of the 20th century’s worst atrocities, an attempt—however imperfect—to establish that some acts are beyond politics. But its history has been uneven. Cases have clustered in Africa. Enforcement has depended on cooperation that is often withheld. Critics have long argued that the court risks becoming a tribunal of the weak, its authority shrinking when it approaches the strong.

Khan’s experience, as he described it, seemed to crystallise that dilemma. The pressure he faced was not hidden. It was overt, sometimes blunt, and occasionally framed as a reminder of the court’s supposed limits. And yet, in proceeding, he signalled a different interpretation: that those limits are not fixed, and that the law, if it is to mean anything, must at least attempt to test them.

Whether that attempt succeeds is another matter. The ICC has no police force. Arrest warrants rely on states to act, and many will not. The likelihood of Netanyahu or Gallant appearing in a courtroom in The Hague remains uncertain at best.

But the significance of the moment lies elsewhere. It is in the exposure of the system itself—the pressures applied, the assumptions revealed, the lines that powerful states expect not to be crossed.

In the end, the story is not only about one prosecutor or one set of warrants. It is about the fragile idea that law can stand apart from politics—and the persistent reality that politics rarely lets it.

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