New recordings reported by The New York Times this week show Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the late US Senator Lindsey Graham privately coordinating a bipartisan group of lawmakers to denounce the International Criminal Court (ICC) just days before the 2024 US election.
The footage, part of roughly 400 hours filmed by British documentary maker Alex Holder for a planned project on Graham, captured two calls on October 29, 2024, weeks before ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Khan was removed from his post last week in a vote by ICC member states, a decision UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese said lined up “neatly” with efforts to neutralise Netanyahu’s warrant.
Israel has a documented history of pressuring, lobbying and undermining international bodies when their findings threaten its political or legal standing. Here are five examples.
1. The ICC and Karim Khan’s removal
In the October calls, Netanyahu told Graham that a three-judge panel was close to a decision on his arrest warrant, and suggested that misconduct allegations then swirling around Khan could help delay it.
He proposed a letter from senators demanding a review before any warrant was issued, and asked Graham to secure Democratic signatures.
Graham delivered two, Richard Blumenthal and Ben Cardin, and the letter went out on 1 November.
It did not stop the warrants, issued three weeks later. Khan was cleared of wrongdoing by an ICC judicial panel in March 2026, but a bureau of member states voted to disregard that finding and removed him anyway.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar reportedly set up a task force to lobby member states ahead of the vote.
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2. The Goldstone Report retraction
The 2009 UN fact-finding mission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone found that there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity during the 2008-09 Gaza war.
Goldstone faced sustained personal pressure, including an attempt by the South African Zionist Federation to bar him from his own grandson’s bar mitzvah.
In April 2011, he published a Washington Post op-ed partially softening the report’s conclusions.
