People stand outside the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the United States is considering imposing sanctions as soon as this week against the entire International Criminal Court, in The Hague, Netherlands, Sept. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw

The president of the International Criminal Court said on Monday that US sanctions imposed on senior court officials disrupt their personal lives but vowed the institution would not yield to outside pressure.

President Donald Trump’s administration slapped targeted sanctions on nine ICC officials, including prosecutors and judges, earlier this year in retaliation for investigations into alleged Israeli war crimes. Sources have said Washington is also mulling sanctions against the entire court.

“We never accept any kind of pressure from anyone on issues of interpretation of the statutory framework and adjudication of cases,” Judge Tomoko Akane said on the first day of the annual meeting in The Hague of the court’s governing body, made up of representatives of its 125 member states.

Akane said the sanctions had unsettled the family lives of targeted officials and disrupted their financial transactions, even in ICC member states in Europe.

The sanctions freeze any US assets the individuals may have and essentially cut them off from the US financial system, with which almost all internationally operating banks have close ties.

Last November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.

Khan initially made his surprise demand for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant on the same day in May that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the allegations.

However, the ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the enclave during the war.

Israel also says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, despite Hamas’s widely acknowledged military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.

US and Israeli officials have issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, which launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Washington has previously targeted court officials with sanctions for their roles in those cases and in a separate investigation into suspected crimes in Afghanistan, which initially had examined actions by US troops.

The ICC was founded in 2002 under a treaty giving it jurisdiction to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that were either committed by a citizen of a member state or had taken place on a member state’s territory.

The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.