Israeli officials are openly celebrating the removal of Karim Khan as prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the man who sought arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the genocide in Gaza, and are publicly claiming to have worked to bring it about.
The court's member states voted on Friday to remove Khan following disciplinary proceedings tied to sexual misconduct allegations, with 85 of the 125 member states voting in favour, according to Haaretz. It is the first time in the court's history that a chief prosecutor has been removed from office. Khan, a British barrister who has denied all allegations against him, was suspended in June after the court's oversight body found he had committed serious misconduct.
Israel's response was celebratory and unguarded about its own involvement. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar welcomed the outcome publicly.
Israeli diplomatic correspondent Guy Azriel then reported that Saar had personally driven the effort to remove Khan, writing that a senior Israeli official told him the foreign minister played an active role in advancing the move, oversaw a dedicated task force, and employed intensive diplomatic efforts aimed at securing Khan's removal from office.
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, was blunter still, framing the removal as punishment for Khan's pursuit of Netanyahu. He said Khan had believed that by launching what Danon called a political witch hunt against Israel and issuing an arrest warrant against Netanyahu, the world would ignore the misconduct allegations against him, and that he had been wrong. Danon went on to address New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani directly, warning him to take note that using Israel as a political weapon would not shield him from accountability, a reference to Mamdani's calls to enforce the warrant against Netanyahu.
Israeli media coverage carried the same framing, presenting Khan's dismissal as the downfall of the prosecutor who dared to go after war criminal Netanyahu, rather than as a misconduct case. The celebration makes little effort to separate the two, and in doing so Israeli officials have themselves cast the removal as a political victory over the court that charged their prime minister.
The context they leave out is the campaign of pressure that preceded it. Long before Friday's vote, Khan and the ICC were subjected to sustained intimidation over the Israel case. Khan was reportedly warned in 2025 that he and the court would be destroyed if the warrants against Netanyahu and former war minister Yoav Gallant were not withdrawn, a message linked to a Netanyahu adviser. He was earlier threatened by the then British foreign secretary that London would defund and withdraw from the court if it issued the warrants, and by a US senator with sanctions if he applied for them. The United States under Donald Trump went on to impose sanctions on Khan and several ICC judges over the Netanyahu warrant, and Khan received a security briefing warning that the Israeli Mossad was active in The Hague and posed a potential threat to him.
What's next
The immediate legal answer is that Khan's removal does not touch the warrants. The arrest warrants issued against Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024 for crimes against humanity remain in force, and can only be withdrawn by the court's judges, not by its prosecutor or its member states. The 125 member states remain legally obliged to arrest Netanyahu if he enters their territory. In that narrow sense, nothing has changed.
What changes is the pressure on the case behind the warrants. The Office of the Prosecutor drives the underlying investigation into Israel's genocide in Gaza, decides whether to seek further warrants, and marshals the evidence that would support any eventual trial. Removing the prosecutor who initiated the case, while the court operates under US sanctions and open Israeli lobbying, sends a clear signal to whoever takes his place about the cost of pursuing Israel. A successor prosecutor must now be elected by the same member states, in the same political climate, and will inherit a case that has already cost the previous prosecutor his job.
