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In a development that deepens the International Criminal Court’s controversial investigation into alleged crimes against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, sources familiar with the process have confirmed to Middle East Eye that the ICC Office of the Prosecutor submitted a confidential arrest warrant application last month for Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

Contrary to earlier Israeli media reports that claimed five warrant applications had been filed against senior Israeli officials over the weekend, MEE has verified those claims are inaccurate. While an evidence review was held last Wednesday to advance potential applications for two additional figures—including Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir—those documents have not yet been formally submitted to the court.

The charges laid out against Smotrich in the pending application are unprecedented for an international court. They include the war crimes and crimes against humanity of forced population transfer of Israeli civilians into occupied territory, forced displacement of Palestinian civilians, along with the crimes against humanity of persecution and apartheid. If the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber approves the warrant, it will mark the first time an international court has issued an arrest warrant on apartheid charges against a sitting senior government official.

The application was formally logged with the court on April 2, capping months of growing pressure from Palestinian authorities for the prosecutor’s office to take action against Smotrich and Ben Gvir. In a March letter to ICC deputy prosecutors obtained by MEE, the Palestinian Mission to The Hague submitted new, detailed evidence documenting alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israeli occupation forces and unauthorized Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The letter also emphasized that Israeli domestic judicial authorities have refused to initiate credible prosecutions for the alleged offenses.

“The urgency to take action now cannot be overstated in any way, with the erasure and the destruction of the Palestinian people, as manifested by an illegal occupant, materializing by the day,” the mission’s letter stated.

When MEE reached out to the ICC Office of the Prosecutor for comment on the Smotrich application, a spokesperson declined to directly confirm or deny the filing, stopping short of an explicit denial. Citing the court’s November 2024 amended regulations, which require all arrest warrant applications to remain classified under seal unless ICC judges explicitly authorize public disclosure, the spokesperson explained the court cannot address questions about any alleged warrant request.

“The Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC is unable to comment on questions related to any alleged application for a warrant of arrest,” the spokesperson said.

In an earlier statement to Reuters on Sunday, ICC spokesperson Oriane Maillet said the court “denies the issuance of new arrest warrants in the situation in the state of Palestine.” Legal analysts note this comment is inconsistent with the court’s own secrecy rules, as the regulation bars any public comment on the existence or status of pending applications, and the denial only addresses whether a warrant has been issued, not whether an application has been filed. Per MEE’s reporting, the OTP’s official current communications policy is to decline to either confirm or deny existence of any pending arrest warrant applications, bringing the earlier public denial out of step with established procedure.

If judges ultimately approve the warrant for Smotrich, he will become the third senior Israeli official to face an ICC arrest warrant. The court issued warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024 over alleged war crimes connected to the 2023-2025 Gaza campaign, a move that triggered an aggressive retaliatory campaign from Israel and the United States, which has targeted the court with threats and sanctions to force an end to the investigation.

Since the start of the second Trump administration in February 2025, the U.S. has imposed sweeping financial and visa sanctions on ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, his two deputy prosecutors, eight sitting ICC judges, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestine, and three leading Palestinian human rights organizations, all tied to the court’s investigation. All three pre-trial judges who approved the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants—Reine Alapini-Gansou of Benin, Beti Hohler of Slovenia, and Nicolas Guillou of France—have been targeted with U.S. sanctions. Despite the personal disruption the measures have caused, the three judges have continued their official duties, including their current review of the Smotrich application. The U.S. has also threatened to impose full sanctions on the ICC as an institution, a step court insiders have described as a catastrophic “doomsday scenario” for the court’s functionality.

The court is currently navigating two procedural challenges brought by Israel: one challenging the ICC’s very jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories, and a separate November 17 complaint seeking to disqualify the chief prosecutor over unsubstantiated claims of bias against Israel. It remains unclear how long pre-trial judges will take to issue a ruling on the Smotrich application.

Historically, ICC pre-trial chambers take several months to review and rule on warrant applications, though timelines have varied widely. The court approved warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in roughly one month each, while the Netanyahu and Gallant applications took six months to process. As of the latest updates, the Smotrich application has not received final judicial approval, and a final decision could still be months away.

It is important to clarify the distinct two-stage process for arrest warrants at the ICC, which separates investigative work from judicial review. The OTP, which is currently led by the two deputy prosecutors while Khan remains on a leave of absence, conducts all investigative work, collects evidence, and builds the prosecutorial case. Once the OTP determines the legal threshold for a warrant has been met, it submits a formal application laying out the alleged crimes and the evidence connecting the suspect to those offenses. The application is then transferred to the Pre-Trial Chamber, a three-judge panel, which independently reviews the prosecution’s evidence to determine if there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the suspect committed a crime falling within the court’s jurisdiction. The panel can approve a warrant on any subset of the proposed charges, approve all charges, or reject the application entirely.

MEE first reported last year that Chief Prosecutor Khan had prepared draft warrant applications for both Ben Gvir and Smotrich ahead of his May 2024 leave. The applications were delayed by the acting deputy prosecutors leading the office in Khan’s absence, in large part due to existing threats of U.S. sanctions. Just days after MEE published that initial report, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the two deputy prosecutors.

Smotrich and Ben Gvir have faced growing international consequences for their policies toward Palestinians since June 2025, when a coordinated global sanctions campaign targeted both men over repeated public statements and policy actions that multiple governments have characterized as advocating ethnic cleansing and extermination of Palestinian communities. Both ministers are residents of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are universally recognized as illegal under international law, and both have publicly pushed for full Israeli annexation of the West Bank and the resettlement of Israeli civilians in the Gaza Strip following the 2023-2025 war.

In June 2025, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway jointly imposed national sanctions on the two ministers, freezing any assets they hold in those jurisdictions and issuing entry bans. “The ministers have incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights,” then-UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy said at the time. Under the UK sanctions regime, it is a criminal offense to provide any funds to either man, and they are barred from holding or promoting interests in any UK-registered company.

Multiple other Western nations have followed suit with their own restrictions. In July 2025, Slovenia became the first European Union member state to declare both men persona non grata, while the Netherlands, Belgium, and Spain have implemented national travel bans. The Dutch entry ban applies across the entire 29-nation Schengen Area, which allows for free movement between participating states.

An EU-wide sanctions proposal targeting Ben Gvir and Smotrich has been under consideration for nearly two years. Then-EU High Representative for Foreign Policy Josep Borrell first introduced the proposal in August 2024, describing the ministers’ statements as “incitement to war crimes,” but the measure failed after it could not secure the required unanimity among all EU member states. Current High Representative Kaja Kallas revived the initiative, and in September 2025 the European Commission formally proposed a broader package that included a partial suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, alongside targeted sanctions against Hamas leaders, violent extremist Israeli settlers, and the two Israeli cabinet ministers.

On May 11, the EU Foreign Affairs Council reached an agreement to sanction unauthorized settler organizations and Hamas leaders, but removed both Smotrich and Ben Gvir from the sanctions list after Germany, Italy, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Hungary publicly confirmed they would not support including the ministers. The U.S. has consistently opposed all international sanctions on the two ministers, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly urging allied nations to reverse their existing sanctions, while the Trump administration has imposed sanctions on ICC officials to pressure the court to abandon its Israel-related investigations.

A devastating scuba diving accident in the Maldives, one of the Indian Ocean’s most popular tropical tourist destinations, has left six people dead, marking the deadliest single diving incident in the nation’s modern history. Last Thursday, a group of five Italian divers entered the water at Vaavu Atoll, roughly 62 miles south of the capital city of Male, and never resurfaced as scheduled. Now, officials have confirmed to the BBC that a joint search team made up of elite Finnish and Maldivian rescue divers has located the remains of the four still-missing members of the group, trapped inside a narrow underwater cave 60 meters below the surface.

The fifth Italian diver’s body was recovered just hours after the group failed to return to their boat on Thursday. But the tragedy deepened on Saturday, when a Maldivian military Staff Sergeant Mohamed Mahdhee, a rescue diver part of the eight-person search team, went missing during the operation. When Mahdhee failed to surface with his teammates, they immediately conducted an emergency search and found him unconscious, and he could not be revived.

The recovered Italian victims include two researchers from the University of Genoa: marine science professor Monica Montefalcone, and research fellow Muriel Oddenino, who had traveled to the Maldives to conduct field work on how climate change is impacting coral reef biodiversity. Also killed were Montefalcone’s daughter, Giorgia Sommacal, a University of Genoa student, recent graduate Federico Gualtieri, and boat operations manager and lead diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti — the first victim whose body was retrieved after the accident.

At the time of the dive, local authorities had issued a yellow weather warning for the area, noting rough sea conditions that posed heightened risks for small vessels and divers. Mohamed Hossain Shareef, a spokesperson for the Maldivian government, confirmed that the research team held a valid scientific permit, active through the end of that week, that allowed diving to a maximum depth of 50 meters across multiple atolls, including Vaavu. The permit specifically approved their work studying coral, but did not mention any plan to explore the nearby cave, whose opening sits 47 meters below the ocean surface.

Irregularities have already emerged around the dive: only three of the five Italian divers were listed as research personnel on the permit, and Sommacal and Benedetti were not included in the approved mission. In a statement to the BBC, the University of Genoa clarified that it had never authorized any deep-sea diving activity as part of the team’s approved research mission. Officials at the university noted that any permit requests submitted to Maldivian authorities for the dive were made outside the bounds of the officially approved research mission, and that the fatal cave dive was undertaken by the group in a personal capacity, separate from their academic work. The university also expressed profound sorrow over the loss of life, extending its condolences to the families of all the deceased.

Recovery operations are set to unfold over the coming days, Shareef confirmed. Two of the four trapped bodies are scheduled to be brought to the surface on Tuesday, with the remaining two to be recovered the following day. The four located remains are trapped in the third and furthest chamber of the cave, requiring specialized additional dives to extract them safely. An official investigation is currently ongoing to determine the full sequence of events and root causes that led to the accident.