{"id":1053,"date":"2026-04-12T05:19:45","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T05:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/1053\/"},"modified":"2026-04-12T05:19:45","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T05:19:45","slug":"the-tangled-case-of-karim-khan-and-the-i-c-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/1053\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tangled Case of Karim Khan and the I.C.C."},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThings are being pushed,\u201d Khan told her, by forces out to \u201cget rid of the warrants for Palestine, get rid of the warrants for Russia, get rid of the whole court.\u201d Khan and the Malaysian woman were both married, and he warned her that a misconduct scandal would not only harm the woman and her family, and Khan and his family. The \u201ccasualties\u201d would also include \u201cthe justice of the victims that now, finally, are on the cusp of progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ninety minutes after the call ended, an anonymous X account began leaking details from the same secondhand report that had been included in the anonymous e-mail. Stories appeared in the media, including an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, on October 23, 2024, which reported that the woman had accused Khan of \u201clocking her into his office and sexually touching her,\u201d making \u201cvisits to her hotel room in the middle of the night, demanding to be let in,\u201d and \u201cclaiming to have a headache and lying on her hotel bed, sexually touching her.\u201d A few weeks later, the I.C.C.\u2019s governing body requested an external investigation. By the time the U.N. began one, the woman was levelling an even more serious allegation: that Khan had repeatedly forced her into \u201ccoercive\u201d sex. (Khan, who has denied any misconduct, declined requests for an interview.)<\/p>\n

Selective leaks from the ambiguous phone call\u2014in particular, Khan\u2019s references to Palestinians and other victims being \u201con the cusp of progress\u201d\u2014have improbably bound together the woman\u2019s allegation of sexual abuse with the international power struggle over the Israeli arrest warrants. Khan and his lawyers have contended that Netanyahu and his allies are exploiting a vulnerable woman in order to discredit the case against the Israeli leaders. Netanyahu, in turn, has repeatedly claimed that Khan sought the warrants only to divert attention from the woman\u2019s charges.<\/p>\n

Indeed, in a video interview in August with Breitbart, Netanyahu accused Khan of an elaborate scheme, claiming that, when Khan learned about the woman\u2019s allegations, \u201che said, \u2018I\u2019m ruined. I have to get out of this somehow,\u2019 so he decided the best way to get out of that was to hit the Jews, or to hit the Prime Minister of the Jewish state.\u201d Dismissing the I.C.C. as \u201ca completely corrupt organization,\u201d and describing the female accuser as a Malaysian hostile to Israel, Netanyahu charged, without evidence, that the court had told her, \u201cListen, it\u2019s more important to falsely accuse Israel of these war crimes than for your charges to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Woman<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cLong story short: \u2018Fred,\u2019 I said, \u2018what good are monkey bars without monkeys?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Cartoon by Michael Maslin<\/p>\n

The Trump Administration and Netanyahu allies in the Republican-led U.S. Congress have seized on the sexual-abuse allegations as part of a broader defense of Netanyahu and Gallant against the I.C.C. charges. Six days after the October 17th call and leak, Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, announced that the woman\u2019s claims had put \u201ca moral cloud\u201d over Khan\u2019s decision to seek the warrants. President Trump, in a statement, has accused the court of \u201cillegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel\u201d which constitute \u201can unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.\u201d The U.S. has now sanctioned Khan, his two deputies, and several I.C.C. judges\u2014freezing their assets, blocking their access to the U.S. financial system, and restricting their ability to enter the country. Several I.C.C. staffers with American ties resigned.<\/p>\n

The international uproar over the sexual-abuse charges culminated in an article this spring in the Wall Street Journal, which reported the woman\u2019s allegations and strongly suggested that Khan had sought the warrants as a tactical deflection. Six days later, Khan took a leave of absence that brought the work of the court to a virtual standstill.<\/p>\n

The attempt to link the sexual-assault allegations and the Israeli warrants is at odds with many facts. Khan\u2019s pursuit of the warrants was hardly new or secret. A team of lawyers in the prosecutor\u2019s office had worked for several months on an investigation of Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza. Because accusing Israel of grave misdeeds was so explosive\u2014Khan described it to Amanpour as \u201cthe San Andreas Fault of international politics and strategic interests\u201d\u2014he had also, in January, 2024, made the unorthodox choice to solicit a second opinion from an outside panel of experts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThings are being pushed,\u201d Khan told her, by forces out to \u201cget rid of the warrants for Palestine,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1187,1188,1189,1192,1190,1191,42],"class_list":{"0":"post-1053","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-hague","8":"tag-a-reporter-at-large","9":"tag-audio","10":"tag-inverted","11":"tag-magazine","12":"tag-onecolumnnarrow","13":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","14":"tag-the-hague"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}