What happened
The ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber issued the warrants on 21 November 2024 alongside one for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif (whom Israel says it had already killed in a July 2024 strike, a claim the ICC's warrant process did not resolve one way or the other) — a deliberate signal that the court was pursuing individual criminal responsibility on both sides of the conflict rather than singling out only Israeli officials, though the Deif warrant is not directly at issue in this entry.
Israel, which is not a member state of the ICC (neither is the US), challenged the court's jurisdiction on multiple grounds: that Palestine is not a state capable of delegating jurisdiction to the ICC, that Israel's own domestic legal system was already investigating the same conduct (which under the ICC's complementarity principle would normally bar the court from proceeding), and, after the warrants were issued, that the October 7 attack constituted new circumstances requiring a fresh jurisdictional review under Rome Statute Article 18. The ICC's Appeals Chamber, reviewing Israel's Article 18 and 19 challenges, found in April 2025 that one of the Pre-Trial Chamber's original decisions had insufficiently addressed Israel's jurisdictional argument and sent it back for further consideration — a partial procedural win for Israel — but explicitly declined, in the same ruling, to suspend the arrest warrants themselves while that jurisdictional question was reconsidered, meaning the warrants remained legally in force throughout.
The practical effect has been significant despite no arrest having occurred: Netanyahu has had to weigh travel to ICC member states (123 countries, including most of Europe) against the theoretical obligation those states have to arrest him, a small number of European governments have stated they would enforce the warrant if he entered their territory, and others, including Germany, have signalled they would not — an unresolved patchwork that illustrates the practical limits of ICC enforcement against a sitting head of government from a non-member, militarily powerful state, even where the underlying legal warrant remains valid and upheld on appeal.