Six U.S. senators — Democrats Ben Cardin, Dick Blumenthal and John Fetterman and Republicans Lindsey Graham, John Thune and Joni Ernst — put aside their many differences in the hours before the national elections and jointly wrote to the supervising body of the International Criminal Court, sitting at The Hague. Their well-founded bipartisan complaint is that the ICC prosecutor, British lawyer Karim Khan, violated the international treaty governing the court in his request for indictments of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for the war in Gaza following Hamas’ barbarous Oct. 7 pogrom, which murdered 1,200 Israelis and took 251 others as hostages. Under the concept of “complementarity,” the ICC is required to let a country’s own legal system (in this case, Israel’s independent judiciary) investigate such allegations and pursue charges if warranted. If a country lacks a legitimate and mature legal system or if a country with such precedents and tradition refuses, only then should the ICC step in. So since Russia has a phony court system entirely subservient to the whims of the Kremlin, the ICC prosecutor won indictments from the court for the alleged criminal actions of Vladimir Putin and five other Russians stemming from the illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. However, as the six senators point out, Israel has the means to conduct its own probe and should have been afforded that opportunity as the ICC treaty mandates. Their letter states that officials from Khan’s office were set to fly to Israel on May 20 to consult with the Israelis. However, Khan’s aides never boarded the flight from Amsterdam and left the Israeli welcoming party at Ben Gurion Airport to greet a plane they were not on. That same day, Khan announced that he was applying to the court for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, an outrageous breach of the court’s protocol, rightly denounced by the White House. To make himself seemed evenhanded, Klan also requested arrest warrants for the three leaders of Hamas for war crimes and crimes against humanity: Mohammed Deif, head of the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the terrorists; Ismail Haniyeh, boss of the Hamas political bureau; and Yahya Sinwar, the overall chief of Hamas. Their guilt is real, but any warrants are useless. An Israeli airstrike killed Deif on July 13 in Gaza, Haniyeh was blown up by Israel in Tehran on July 31 and Sinwar was shot dead by Israeli troops in Gaza on Oct. 16. Dead men aren’t indicted, even by the ICC, so the requests are moot. As for the two Israelis, Netanyahu and Gallant, the court should deny the request. The senators also raise press reports that Khan personally is subject to a sexual harassment claim lodged by a female employee of the ICC and used the requests for arrest warrants as cover to distract from his own problems. Either way, whether the public fillings were politically motivated or personally motivated or any other reason, Khan’s seeking of indictments against the Israelis was improper. His actions do nothing to advance the cause of international justice, but risk causing serious damage to the ICC as an institution.