A coalition of United States taxpayers and international human rights legal practitioners formally launched a landmark legal push on Wednesday at the International Criminal Court’s headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands, calling for a full investigation of US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on charges of aiding and abetting genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity tied to Israeli military operations in Gaza.
Organized by the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (TAAG), the formal Article 13 submission to the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor draws on nearly 12 months of exhaustive evidence gathering, including sworn affidavits from Gaza-based medical personnel, firsthand eyewitness testimony, whistleblower disclosures, verified video documentation, and thousands of pages of records outlining Washington’s unbroken military, financial, diplomatic, and political backing for Israeli actions in the enclave. Contributing evidence to the filing are Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who completed two frontline medical deployments in Gaza, and David McIntosh, a former contractor for the now-defunct, scandal-plagued Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, both of whom have previously shared granular accounts of conditions in the territory with Middle East Eye. TAAG stated in its accompanying press release that the compiled evidence meets the legal threshold to prove Israeli operations in Gaza, which multiple UN agencies and leading Holocaust studies scholars have formally labeled a genocide against Palestinian civilians, could not have proceeded without continuous US material support.
TAAG co-founder Seth Donnelly told assembled reporters at the Hague press conference that the submission provides sufficient documented proof to justify the issuance of ICC arrest warrants for both Trump and Rubio, urging the prosecutor’s office to advance the case without delay. Donnelly noted that the group had spent years pursuing redress through the US federal court system to block US officials’ complicity in alleged genocide, only to face repeated institutional failure to address the core allegations.
Latest Gaza health ministry data confirms more than 74,500 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli forces over a three-year period, with airstrikes and sniper attacks continuing at scale more than 12 months after a 2025 ceasefire agreement was formally brokered. The Lancet medical journal has projected the final death toll will rise far higher once all unrecovered remains under rubble are fully accounted for, with at least 19 children confirmed killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza in the most recent 30-day reporting window alone.
The new submission comes at a fraught moment for the ICC, which already has two active outstanding arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes in Gaza. The Trump administration has taken unprecedented hostile action against the global court, making the full dismantling of the institution a signature policy priority. Just hours after one of the ICC’s founding judges was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month, the US moved to sever the court’s access to the US-dominated global cross-border banking system, following earlier sweeping sanctions targeting 9 of the court’s 18 sitting judges and its entire senior leadership team, including the ICC president and former chief prosecutor.
Reed Brody, a veteran Human Rights Watch counsel and leading war crimes litigator who coordinated a separate 2024 ICC petition targeting former US President Joe Biden and ex-Secretary of State Antony Blinken over similar Gaza complicity allegations, told Middle East Eye on Wednesday that the ICC is currently “fighting for its institutional survival,” but that TAAG’s submission represents exactly the type of accountability action the court was established to deliver. Brody noted that while bold immediate action from the court seems unlikely under current political pressure, the two deputy prosecutors currently serving as interim leadership could choose to advance the case as a demonstration of independence from US coercion, amid a leadership transition triggered by the ousting of former chief prosecutor Karim Khan earlier this year following a member state misconduct investigation that Khan has repeatedly denied.
TAAG was able to move forward with its Hague filing after a landmark ruling last month from US District Judge Jesse Furman of the Southern District of New York, who issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from imposing civil or criminal penalties on TAAG and fellow advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) for their work supporting ICC-related proceedings. Furman ruled that the groups had demonstrated a strong likelihood of prevailing in their lawsuit arguing that Trump’s 2024 Executive Order 14203, which criminalizes providing any “service” to ICC-sanctioned individuals or entities, violates core First Amendment free speech protections, noting that even temporary restrictions on such speech constitute irreparable harm under US constitutional precedent. The two advocacy groups stated they accelerated their ICC filing immediately after Rubio published an op-ed earlier this year vowing to dismantle the ICC “brick by brick.” Four additional US human rights organizations have filed a separate ongoing lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s sweeping ICC sanctions, arguing the national emergency justification cited to authorize the measures is entirely unsubstantiated by factual evidence.
The long-running tension between Washington and the ICC stretches back to the court’s founding: the Bill Clinton administration signed the Rome Statute establishing the body in 2000, but never submitted the treaty to the US Senate for ratification over persistent fears the ICC could pursue prosecutions of US military personnel and political officials for alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump has explicitly stated that his administration’s aggressive campaign against the ICC is specifically designed to block any investigations targeting Israeli officials for actions in Gaza.