Karim Khan and the targeted assassination of the ICC
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Robert Inlakesh writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 31 July 2026:
The fall of the International Criminal Court’s former prosecutor will go down in history as a dark chapter – while an effort has been made to make this about Karim Khan, it never had much to do with him at all.
In May of last year, an Israeli-British defense lawyer linked to a Netanyahu adviser, named Nicholas Kaufman, had informed the then ICC prosecutor Karim Khan that Israel was willing to put a deal on the table for him.
In exchange for the prosecutor withdrawing his arrest warrants against Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the proposal was allowing him and the court itself to survive.
Khan was made clear that in the event that he did not bow to Tel Aviv’s demands, he would be “destroyed”. In fact, something else was made even clearer: if he decided to go in the direction of pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, “all options are off the table”. “They will destroy you, and they will destroy the court”, the Israeli-British lawyer made it clear.
It was back in May of 2024 that Khan had applied for arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and his then defense minister, along with three Hamas leaders, all of whom have since been killed. This came after a panel at the court had reviewed the issue and decided there was enough evidence to issue the warrants. Coincidentally, the allegations of sexual misconduct also popped up earlier this very same month.
When asked, a day after Khan requested the issuance of the arrest warrants, Netanyahu confidently stated: “I’m not concerned at all about our status. I think the prosecutor should be concerned about his status”.
Come July of 2026, the situation has played out precisely as Israel’s threats had suggested it would. Israel Lobby-paid American representatives leveraged their positions and wasted time that they were voted in to use on Americans to attack the ICC, delegitimize it, and issue sanctions against the court and its chief prosecutor.