Karim Khan, the ICC’s rogue prosecutor

Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of October 7, went to meet his maker last week. Having spent a year being pursued through the underground tunnels of Gaza that he had built, he finally put his head up above the surface in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah. The world that had told the IDF not to go into Rafah was once again proved wrong. Sinwar was killed in an exchange of fire by a 19-year-old Israeli soldier who was not even in uniform on October 7.

A couple of days after Sinwar’s demise, I went into Rafah to see the house where he spent his final minutes. It had once been a rather nice villa, owned by a Palestinian family who have since been keen to stress that they had absolutely no connection to the dead terrorist. Sinwar simply bolted where he could and ran up these stairs, trailing blood as he went. From the first floor of the house he had his final view of Gaza.

It is not a good view. After a year of house-to-house fighting there is hardly a building that is undamaged. But I wondered, as I sat in the last seat he had been in and surveyed the same landscape, whether he had thought, even for a moment, about what he had done. Not just about his orchestration of the massacre of 1,200 Jews and the kidnapping of hundreds more (100 of whom are still unaccounted for) but also what this “leader” of the Palestinian people had done to the Palestinian people. He started a war, and told them that Hamas could win it. He tried to annihilate the Jewish state and lied to the Palestinian people that Hamas could achieve it. Very few people in the region and only a few dolts on college campuses and online trolls will now miss him.

But his death does pose an interesting question for, among others, Karim Khan and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

In May this preposterous prosecutor announced that he was seeking a set of arrest warrants for “the situation in the State of Palestine.” Ignore for a moment the fact that there is no recognized “State of Palestine” and consider what Khan actually did. Without having presented any evidence, he announced that he was seeking to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant. As though to show that he is a fair-minded sort of chap, he said that he was also looking into issuing arrest warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

Now all three of these Hamas heads are dead. They have gone to meet their one 72-year-old virgin. And this brings even more into question what this strange British prosecutor Khan is doing, or is trying to do, now that he has only democratically elected Israeli leaders in his sights.

Stories in the weekend’s papers bring some of this into a clearer light. As the Mail on Sunday reported, Khan rushed out his announcement in May, to the great dissatisfaction of the professional team at the ICC. People inside the organization were annoyed by the manner of his announcement and the way in which he made himself a sort of “world policeman” in an unprecedented self-promotional video. Publicity-seeking alone didn’t quite seem to explain it.

Now it turns out that there may have been another reason why Khan made his announcement when he did. It transpires that a female co-worker had made accusations against him of sexual harassment, an allegation he denies. It took a while for the woman to make a complaint to a colleague, but she did, and Khan knew that this was about to come out. Khan’s brother is the former Conservative MP Imran Ahmad Khan, who was sent to prison two years ago for sexual molestation, so Karim knows what it’s like for someone in a position of power to fall from grace awfully far and fast. The timeline of events suggests that the reason Karim Khan panicked and issued charges not just against three terrorists he had no chance of prosecuting but also against two democratically elected leaders (the first time the ICC has dared to try that) is that it was his insurance policy.

A week after his botched announcement, his allies put down a further little insurance plan for him by suggesting that he thought Mossad could threaten and blackmail him.

Khan’s sense of self-worth and self-protection were already known to be pretty impressive. Before he made his announcement in May, a number of American senators wrote to remind him that the US would regard it as a hostile act for an unelected international body to go after Americans or America’s allies. Khan responded by telling the senators that under the Rome Statute (which America is also not a signatory to), threatening sanctions against a judge of the ICC could itself constitute a war crime.

Has the inexplicable now become explicable? By going off early and presenting no evidence, Khan has already compromised the investigation he pretends to be interested in. A number of the people around Khan are starting to speak out and speak to the media. There will be more to come.

Khan will obviously try to present himself as the injured party here. But it is he who has done something outrageous in international law, and if the allegations of his colleagues are true, he appears to have done so in order to protect his own skin.

People will have differing views of the war in Gaza, but I have seen enough of it up close to know that it is the ICC that is in the process of be-clowning itself. The explanation as to “why” is now finding its way out. Perhaps the real inquiry should be into this rogue prosecutor?

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.