Netanyahu hails US sanctions on ICC and calls Nobel laureate jurist 'bigot'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday praised the US for imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has issued a warrant for his arrest over war crimes in Gaza. "The ICC is not a court. It is a political body that poses a mortal threat to law-abiding democracies worldwide and to the very idea of national sovereignty," Netanyahu's office posted on X. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the court as an institution on Friday, hours after one of its founding judges, the South African jurist Navi Pillay, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Netanyahu's office called Pillay a "bigot" against Jews for saying Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. "The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass. It has awarded its highest honour to a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state," it said. Pillay headed the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which last year found that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.