Netanyahu compares himself to FDR and Churchill, blasts ICC decision

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared himself to Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt Tuesday as he assailed the International Criminal Court for requesting an arrest warrant against him and his government’s top defense official for alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

In an interview on CNN, the Israeli leader slammed yesterday’s announcement from the Hague as “outrageous” and described the international tribunal’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan as a “rogue prosecutor that has put false charges and created false symmetries that are both dangerous and false.”

The ICC requested warrants for Netanyahu and Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant for Israel Defense Forces’ “total siege of Gaza”, along with Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and two of the group’s commanders for war crimes committed on Oct. 7 against Israeli civilians.

Khan “equates the democratically elected leaders of Israel with the terrorists, tyrants of Hamas,” Netanyahu told CNN anchor Jake Tapper. “That's like saying that, well, I'm issuing arrest warrants for FDR, Churchill, but also for Hitler.”

Netanyahu’s fiery comments come as Israel faces intense international scrutiny for its conduct of the war in the Gaza Strip against the Palestinian militant group Hamas. For months, lawmakers on Capitol Hill had slammed the Israel Defense Force’s efforts to slow the flow of aid into the war-torn territory. International observers and aid groups have also criticized the Israeli government for the high numbers of civilians killed in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli and American politicians from across the political spectrum, even some who have criticized the conduct of the war to date, were quick to bash the international tribunal, of which neither country is a member, for creating “false equivalences” and unfairly scrutinizing Israel for its conduct. Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the push for arrest warrants was “anti-semitic”, while former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett decried the request as a “huge boost to global Jihadi terror” in a post on X.

Yet Netanyahu’s remarks on CNN saw him go further and directly compare himself to American leaders and compare his country’s actions to those of the United States in other conflicts. He also compared himself to former U.S. President George W. Bush and his Hamas counterparts to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

In disputing the accusations that Israel failed to minimize civilian casualties, Netanyahu argued that the Israel Defense Forces did much better than the U.S. military did in the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the 2003 Iraq War.

“The ratio of civilians to combatants killed is the lowest in the history of urban war, certainly dense urban warfare like this. It's about one-to-one,” Netanyahu said.