A review of Israeli media reports published by The Cradle found that Israeli occupation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who himself is wanted under an active International Criminal Court arrest warrant, has ordered his government to prepare a potential ICC case against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over Kurdish policy and alleged support for Hamas.
The dispute between Israeli occupation and Turkiye comes as Netanyahu seeks to win support ahead of next month’s Knesset elections in a bid to remain prime minister. This is not a pursuit of justice for Kurds; it is a manufactured foreign crisis to secure votes at home, using the image of being tough on Erdogan.
According to the report, the proposed legal action would focus primarily on Erdogan’s treatment of Kurdish minorities in Turkiye, while also examining allegations related to Turkish government funding and support for Hamas. It follows a month earlier when Erdogan announced he had approached Interpol to advance efforts toward the arrest of Netanyahu after Israel’s interception of the Gaza-bound activist flotilla.
Netanyahu himself is subject to an ICC arrest warrant issued in November 2024 against the genocide in Gaza. The ICC documented his criminal responsibility for the use of starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and other inhumane acts crimes that are completely and factually proved on the ground in Gaza through mass graves, famine reports, and UN documentation. Israeli occupation has rejected the court’s jurisdiction, sanctioned its chief prosecutor, and lobbied the US to punish ICC staff.
The move also collapses on basic legal scrutiny. Neither Israel nor Türkiye has signed the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court, meaning both countries fall outside the court’s direct jurisdiction. Israeli occupation could theoretically bring the case to the ICC on its own, but the more likely scenario is that it would do so through a proxy party. Officials do not necessarily intend for the case to be filed at all. In other words, even its architects admit it is leverage, not law a file prepared to be waved on TV, not argued in The Hague.
The attempt to deflect has already been called out. Turkish presidential communications director Burhanettin Duran rejected the accusations as “baseless,” saying they could not divert attention from Israel’s actions in Gaza or the legal proceedings in Israel accusing Netanyahu of corruption. He named the two cases Netanyahu is desperate to bury a genocide case in Gaza and a corruption case in Tel Aviv.
The findings expose how a partisan leader uses state power to rewrite accountability erasing his own arrest warrant from public memory, inserting a case against his critic, and applying one rule to himself and another to everyone else. While the Israeli occupation government claims it is pursuing human rights, its own documents show it chose electioneering over justice, and retaliation over law, setting up a spectacle where a man wanted by the ICC for starving Gaza pretends to be the ICC’s guardian against Erdogan.
