The office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court last month filed a secret arrest warrant application for Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, sources briefed on the matter told Middle East Eye.
Israeli media reports over the weekend claiming the prosecutor’s office had filed five applications for Israeli officials are inaccurate, MEE understands.
An evidence review took place on Wednesday last week to examine the possibility of two more warrant applications, including one for national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, but they have yet to be filed.
MEE understands that the charges against Smotrich include forced displacement as a crime against humanity and war crime, the transfer of Israel’s own population as a war crime, and persecution and apartheid as crimes against humanity.
If approved by the ICC’s pre-trial chamber the warrant for Smotrich would be the first ever issued by an international court for the crime of apartheid.
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The application was filed on 2 April, following repeated Palestinian demands for the prosecutor’s office to take action on Smotrich and Ben Gvir.
In a letter to the ICC’s deputy prosecutors in March, seen by MEE, Palestine’s mission to the Hague outlined further evidence of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity by settlers and Israeli occupation forces.
The letter also noted that Israel has failed to prosecute the alleged crimes.
“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 letter read.
When asked by MEE for comment, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office (OTP) did not deny that an application for Smotrich had been filed.
The spokesperson cited the court’s regulations, amended in November, stipulating that applications for arrest warrants are to be classified as secret or under seal, unless otherwise authorised by ICC judges.
“For this reason, 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.
ICC spokesperson Oriane Maillet told Reuters on Sunday the court “denies the issuance of new arrest warrants in the situation in the state of Palestine”.
By addressing whether a warrant has been issued, the denial appears to contradict the ICC’s amended regulations.
MEE understands that the OTP’s latest communication strategy is to neither deny nor confirm reports related to arrest warrants.
If judges issue his arrest warrant, Smotrich will become the third Israeli official wanted by the court, after arrest warrants were issued in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then defence minister Yoav Gallant.
Sanctions on ICC
The Netanyahu and Gallant warrants have unleashed a ferocious campaign of threats and sanctions against the court by Israel and the US, primarily aimed at pressuring it to drop the war crimes investigation.
Since February 2025, Trump’s administration has imposed financial and visa sanctions on the court’s chief prosecutor, Khan, his two deputy prosecutors, eight judges, the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine, and three Palestinian NGOs in connection with the war crimes probe.
All three pre-trial judges who signed off the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants have been sanctioned by the US.
They are Reine Alapini-Gansou (Benin), Beti Hohler (Slovenia) and Nicolas Guillou (France). They have continued to carry out their work, including examining the Smotrich application, despite the impact of the sanctions on their daily lives.
The US has also threatened sanctions against the court itself, which ICC officials consider a “doomsday scenario”.
ICC judges are currently examining an Israeli challenge to its jurisdiction over the Palestine situation, and a separate Israeli complaint, filed on 17 November, which seeks to disqualify the prosecutor over an alleged lack of impartiality.
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It is uncertain how long judges will take to rule on the Smotrich application.
ICC pre-trial judges typically take several months to rule on warrant applications, though timelines have ranged from roughly one month in the cases of Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte to six months for the Netanyahu and Gallant warrants.
So far, the arrest warrant application for Smotrich has not been ratified by the judges and a decision could still be months away.
At the ICC, seeking and issuing arrest warrants are two distinct stages handled by two separate bodies.
The OTP, currently led by two deputy prosecutors, conducts the investigation, including by gathering evidence and building the case.
When it believes the threshold has been met, it files an application asking for a warrant, setting out the alleged crimes and the evidence linking the suspect to them.
The application is then handed to the pre-trial chamber, a panel of three judges, which reviews the prosecution’s material and decides whether there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the person has committed a crime within the court’s jurisdiction.
The pre-trial chamber can issue a warrant on some or all of the charges, or reject the application.
Last year, MEE reported that the ICC’s chief prosecutor Karim Khan had prepared warrant applications against Ben Gvir and Smotrich before he went on leave in May.
The warrant applications have been delayed by the deputy prosecutors, who are in charge of Khan’s office in his absence, partly due to the threat of US sanctions. Days after MEE’s report, the Trump administration sanctioned the two deputy prosecutors.
Sanctions on Smotrich and Ben Gvir
Since June last year, Smotrich and Ben Gvir have been the target of a coordinated international sanctions campaign over their policies and statements advocating the extermination and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Both ministers live in West Bank settlements considered illegal under international law, and both have championed annexation of the territory and the return of Israeli settlers to Gaza.
In June 2025, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway jointly imposed sanctions on the pair, freezing any assets they held in those countries and barring them from entering.
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David Lammy, then the UK’s foreign secretary, said the ministers had “incited extremist violence and serious abuses of Palestinian human rights”.
Under the UK measures, it is now a criminal offence to make funds available to either man, and both are barred from directing or promoting a British company.
Other western states have since followed suit. In July 2025, Slovenia became the first EU member to declare both ministers persona non grata, and the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain have imposed their own travel restrictions, with the Dutch ban extending across the 29-country Schengen Area.
A proposal to sanction Ben Gvir and Smotrich at EU level has been on the table for nearly two years however.
Then-foreign policy chief Josep Borrell first floated it in August 2024, calling the ministers’ statements an “incitement to war crimes”, but the proposal was rejected by member states for lack of the required unanimity.
His successor Kaja Kallas revived the idea, and in September 2025 the European Commission formally proposed a package combining a partial suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement with targeted sanctions on Hamas leaders, violent settlers and the two “extremist ministers”.
On 11 May, the EU’s foreign affairs council agreed to sanction settler organisations and Hamas figures, but not the two cabinet ministers driving the settler policies.
Ben Gvir and Smotrich were stripped from the list after Germany, Italy, Austria, The Czech Republic and Hungary made clear they would not support their inclusion.
The US has opposed the sanctions throughout, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging allies to reverse them and the administration imposing its own sanctions on ICC officials in an effort to halt the court’s Israel-related investigations.
