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ICC Demands Hungary Explain Why Netanyahu Wasn't Arrested During Visit
The head of Amnesty International in Europe said the court has done "what the E.U. should have: taken legal measures against Hungary for its failure to arrest a fugitive wanted for war crimes."
Apr 17, 2025
The International Criminal Court on Wednesday initiated proceedings against Hungary for failing to enforce the tribunal's arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visit to the Central European nation.
The ICC is asking Hungary's far-right government to explain why it did not comply with its warrant for Netanyahu for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Such compliance is required under the Rome Statute, the treaty governing the ICC to which Hungary is signatory.
The tribunal's request cites Article 87 of the Rome Statute, which authorizes legal action against state parties who don't cooperate with the court, and gives Hungary until May 23 to respond.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said shortly before Netanyahu's visit that Hungary would quit the ICC. Not only did Hungary reject the arrest warrant, Orbán literally rolled out the red carpet to welcome his far-right counterpart in Budapest earlier this month, prompting rebuke from the ICC and human rights groups.
In May 2021, ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan applied for warrants to apprehend Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for "crimes of causing extermination, causing starvation as a method of war, including the denial of humanitarian relief supplies, [and] deliberately targeting civilians in conflict."
Khan also sought warrants to arrest three Hamas leaders who have since been killed by Israel for alleged crimes committed during and after the October 7, 2023 attack, including "extermination, murder, taking of hostages, rape, and sexual assault in detention."
The full 18-judge ICC approved the warrants in November, prompting Republicans and dozens of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives to pass legislation to sanction tribunal officials. Democrats subsequently blocked the measure in the Senate. Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC, prompting an ACLU-led lawsuit.
Israel and allies including the United States have either openly flouted the ICC warrant or offered dubious legal reasons for sidestepping the arrest order.
Italy and France, for example, have granted Netanyahu immunity on the grounds that he is the head of state of a country that is not an ICC member.
Trump welcomed Netanyahu to the White House a month before the Budapest trip, though the U.S. is not a party to the Rome Statute.
Although Israel is not signatory to the Rome Statute, officials from non-state parties are still subject to ICC prosecution if they commit crimes inside nations that have ratified the treaty. Palestine became an ICC member in 2015.
Just two years ago France backed the ICC arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin on Ukraine war crimes charges—even though Moscow has not signed the Rome Statute—arguing that "no one responsible for crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine, regardless of their status, should escape justice."
Last year, an ICC panel referred Mongolia to the court's oversight body after it failed to arrest Putin, who was warmly welcomed by Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh and other officials in Ulaanbaatar.
Luis Moreno Ocampo, who served as the ICC's first prosecutor,
told the Emirati newspaper The National on Wednesday that Netanyahu remains free thanks to the political influence of countries including the U.S. However, Ocampo said that "this protection is temporary" and accused Netanyahu of prolonging the Gaza war to delay his own domestic criminal corruption trial.
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Major Gaza Land Grab Underway as Israel's Ethnic Cleansing Escalates
Israeli forces also bombed an U.N. clinic in Jabalia, killing at least 22 Palestinians including elders, women, and children—one of them a newborn baby.
Apr 02, 2025
Israel's far-right government on Wednesday admitted to a major land grab in the embattled Gaza Strip, where the forced removal of Palestinians accelerated amid ongoing airstrikes that killed scores of civilians, including at least 22 people slain in the bombing of a health clinic run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) renewed assault is "expanding to crush and clean" Gaza while "seizing large areas that will be added to the security zones of the state of Israel for the protection of fighting forces and the settlements," a reference to plans by far-right members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government for the ethnic cleansing and Israeli recolonization of the Palestinian enclave.
"Did you decide that we are sacrificing hostages for capturing land?"
Israeli forces control what they call a buffer zone along Gaza's entire border and on Monday ordered a sweeping evacuatione that forced approximately 140,000 Palestinians to flee from Rafah and other areas. In scenes reminiscent of the Nakba—during which over 750,000 Arabs fled or were forced from Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948—Palestinian families were seen carrying their possessions or loading them atop vehicles and donkey carts as they sought ever-elusive safety.
Ihab Suliman, a former university professor forcibly expelled from Jabalia with his family, toldThe Associated Press on Monday that "there is no longer any taste to life. Life and death have become one and the same for us."
The fresh wave of expulsions follows last month's creation of a new IDF directorate tasked with ethnically cleansing northern Gaza under the guise of "voluntary emigration." Katz said the agency would be run "in accordance with the vision of U.S. President Donald Trump," who last month said that the United States would "take over" Gaza after emptying the strip of its over 2 million Palestinians and transform the coastal enclave into the "Riviera of the Middle East." Trump has since attempted to walk back some of his comments.
The renewed ethnic cleansing of southern Gaza came amid heavy IDF airstrikes throughout the strip, including the Wednesday bombing of a clinic-turned-shelter run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Jabalia that killed at least 22 civilians, including women, children, and elders and wounded dozens more, according to local officials. Graphic video of the strike's aftermath showed a man holding up the headless body of a newborn baby outside the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia.
Gaza's Government Media Office called the strike "a full-fledged war crime," while the Palestinian Foreign Ministry urged the international community to pressure Israel "to halt its genocide, displacement, and annexation, and impose a political settlement per international law."
Israel admitted to carrying out the strike, claiming it targeted "Hamas terrorists" hiding among the civilians. Israeli policy implemented after Hamas led the deadliest-ever attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 permits the IDF to knowingly kill an unlimited number of civilians in order to kill just one Hamas member, no matter their rank or role in the organization.
Katz called on Gaza residents to "expel Hamas and return all hostages" kidnapped from Israel on October 7.
However, the umbrella group representing families of some of the abductees—24 of whom are believed to still be alive—on Wednesday accused Netanyahu of "burying the hostages alive" by unilaterally abandoning aa cease-fire with Hamas last month.
"Did you decide that we are sacrificing hostages for capturing land?" the Hostages and Missing Families Forum asked following Katz's announcement. "Instead of getting the hostages out in a deal and ending the war, Israel's government is sending more soldiers to Gaza to fight in the same places that they already fought over and over again."
Since March 18, when Israel broke the cease-fire with Hamas and resumed its assault on Gaza, more than 1,000 Palestinians, including over 320 children, have been killed, and thousands more wounded, according to local and international officials.
Since Israel resumed its terror bombing of Gaza on March 18, every day we see images of small children with their heads or limbs blown off by U.S. weapons. Doctors having to cut holiday clothes off of children in a desperate attempt to save them. Amputations without anesthesia.
— Jeremy Scahill ( @jeremyscahill.com) April 2, 2025 at 3:51 AM
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 175,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them women and children, according the Gaza Health Ministry. That figure includes at least 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Almost all of Gaza's more than 2 million people have been forcibly displaced, often multiple times. Meanwhile, Israel's "complete siege" of Gaza has exacerbated widespread and sometimes deadly starvation and illness.
On Monday, the Gaza Government Media Office said that at least 1,513 humanitarian workers have also been killed by Israeli forces since October 2023. It is uncertain whether that figure includes the 15 first responders—including eight Red Crescent workers and six Civil Defense personnel—whose bodies, some of them allegedly bound and shot, were found in a mass grave that day.
Israel is facing an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice, and Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are fugitives from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which last year issued arrest warrants for the pair for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The ICC joined human rights groups on Wednesday in condemning Netanyahu trip to Hungary, a signatory to the Rome Statute governing the world's top war crimes tribunal. Hungarian President Viktor Orbán and other members of his far-right government are set to welcome Netanyahu for a four-day visit underscoring both countries' disdain for international law.
Meanwhile in the illegally occupied West Bank—where thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded by IDF troops and Jewish settler-colonists since October 2023—the UNRWA area director said this week that the scale of forced displacement is unprecedented during the 58 years of Israeli occupation.
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ICC Rebukes Hungary for Refusing to Carry Out Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu
"Hungary should comply with its legal obligations as a party to the ICC and arrest Netanyahu if he sets foot in the country," said one human rights expert.
Apr 02, 2025
International human rights organizations joined the world's top war crimes tribunal in condemning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Hungary, expected to begin Wednesday evening—with the leader freely traveling to the European country without fear of being arrested under a warrant issued last year for Netanyahu's actions in Gaza.
Hungarian President Viktor Orbán said last year that he rejected the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which directed member countries to arrest Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes they have committed in Gaza starting October 8, 2023.
Hungary's far-right president—who took control of his country's court system several years ago and has used it to further his own political goals, and who banned LGBTQ+ pride events last month—invited Netanyahu to visit Budapest, while his foreign minister called the warrants "shameful and absurd."
Fadi El Abdallah, a spokesperson for the ICC, said Wednesday that it is not up to ICC signatories to "unilaterally determine the soundness of the court's legal decisions," which member countries are legally obligated to follow, including by making arrests when a suspect who is subject to a warrant sets foot within their borders.
"Any dispute concerning the judicial functions of the court shall be settled by the decision of the court," said El Abdallah.
Orbán said in February that he would "review" Hungary's membership in the ICC after U.S. President Donald Trump approved the use of sanctions against ICC officials.
Al Jazeera reported that Hungary may announce its withdrawal from the ICC this week during Netayahu's visit, which is scheduled from Wednesday until April 6.
Liz Evenson, international justice director for Human Rights Watch, called Orbán's welcoming of Netanyahu "an affront to victims of serious crimes."
"Hungary should comply with its legal obligations as a party to the ICC and arrest Netanyahu if he sets foot in the country," said Evenson.
Western European countries including France, Italy, and Germany have also refused to carry out Netanyahu's arrest under the ICC warrant, with the French foreign ministry claiming the prime minister and Gallant have "immunities" because Israel does not recognize the authority of the ICC.
German Christian Democrats Leader Friedrich Merz said last month that he would "find ways and means for [Netanyahu] to visit Germany and also to be able to leave again without being arrested in Germany," adding that it was "a completely absurd idea that an Israeli prime minister cannot visit the Federal Republic of Germany."
Earlier this week, Erika Guevara-Rosas, the head of global research, advocacy, and policy at Amnesty International, said that every trip Netanyahu takes "to an ICC member state that does not end in his arrest" will embolden Israel " to commit further crimes against Palestinians" in Gaza and the West Bank.
"Netanyahu's visit to Hungary must not become a bellwether for the future of human rights in Europe," said Guevara-Rosas. "European and global leaders must end their shameful silence and inaction, and call on Hungary to arrest Netanyahu during a visit which would make a mockery of the suffering of Palestinian victims of Israel's genocide in Gaza, its war crimes in other parts of the occupied Palestinian territory, and its entrenched system of apartheid against all Palestinians whose rights it controls."
In the U.S., which like Israel does not recognize the ICC and which has backed the Israeli assault on Gaza, Netanyahu received a standing ovation last year when he addressed Congress—while progressive lawmakers protested his visit.
The alleged war crimes Netanyahu and Gallant have been accused of include intentionally attacking civilians and starving Gaza's 2.3 million Palestinian residents since Israel began its military assault on the enclave in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack.
Anita Zsurzsán, an independent scholar based in Budapest, wrote at Jacobin on Wednesday that "liberal critics" of the Hungarian president are doing little to challenge Orbán for inviting Netanyahu to the country.
"It seems that the principle of 'never again' is routinely ignored in Hungary. Netanyahu's visit presents a historic opportunity for Hungarians to challenge Orbán on hosting a war criminal," said Zsurzsán. "But, instead of upholding international law and doing what is right, forces across the Hungarian political spectrum have opted for compliance and silence. As has often happened in Hungarian history, this risks leaving an indelible stain of acquiescence to fascism and genocide on our collective conscience."
"The fact that an internationally charged war criminal can walk free in Hungary with no resistance shows that the fascization of Hungarian society is continuing apace," she added.
Evenson called Orbán's decision to ignore the ICC warrant his "latest assault on the rule of law, adding to the country's dismal record on rights," and called on other ICC members to pressure Hungary to comply with the court's statutes.
"All ICC member countries need to make clear they expect Hungary to abide by its obligations to the court," said Evenson, "and that they will do the same."
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