The US House of Representatives votes in favor of a bill to sanction the International Criminal Court (ICC) in retaliation for the arrest warrants it issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s former defense minister Yoav Galante.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Unlawful Court Countermeasures Act on Thursday by an overwhelming margin of 243 to 140, sending a signal of strong support for Israel.

Forty-five Democrats joined 198 Republicans in supporting the bill. No Republicans voted against it.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where the Republican majority was sworn in earlier this month.

this legislation Recommends sanctions against any foreign national who assists the ICC in investigating, detaining, or prosecuting U.S. citizens or citizens of allied countries that do not recognize the authority of the ICC.

Neither the United States nor Israel is a party to the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court.

Sanctions include freezing assets and denying visas to any foreigner who makes material or financial contributions to the work of the court.

“The United States is passing this law because a kangaroo court is seeking to arrest the prime minister of our great ally Israel,” Rep. Brian Mast, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in remarks before Thursday’s vote.

The vote, one of the first since the new Congress took office last week, underscored the strong support for the Israeli government from President-elect Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans even as the war in Gaza continues.

The conflict has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, since it began in October 2023. United Nations experts have condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza as “conforming to the characteristics of genocide.”

That prompted ICC prosecutors to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Galante last May.

In response, U.S. lawmakers threatened retaliation against the ICC. In a letter to outgoing US President Joe Biden in May, dozens of human rights groups urged him to reject calls for punitive action.

“Acting on these calls would seriously harm the interests of all victims around the world and the ability of the U.S. government to defend human rights and the cause of justice,” the groups said. wrote then.

This week, another group of human rights groups released another report letter Ahead of Thursday’s vote, the House bill was condemned as an attack on the “independent judiciary.”

Sanctioning the court would “jeopardize access to justice for desperate victims of all court investigations, undermine the credibility of the sanctions tool in other contexts, and divide the United States with its closest allies,” they wrote.

The letter warned that imposing “asset freezes and entry restrictions” on ICC allies would “suffer the shame of standing with justice with impunity.”

Still, the U.S. Senate under Majority Leader John Thune has pledged to quickly consider the bill so Trump can sign it into law when he takes office on January 20.

In 2020, Trump in his first term Sanctioned Senior leaders of the International Criminal Court exchanged views on the court’s investigation into U.S. crimes in Afghanistan and Israeli crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories. President Biden later lifted those sanctions.

The International Criminal Court, headquartered in The Hague, is a permanent court that prosecutes individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and crimes of aggression.

The Palestinian state has been a member since 2015, and the court first announced an investigation in 2019 into crimes committed by Israeli and Hamas officials in the country.

Although Israel is not a party to the ICC, the court has jurisdiction over crimes committed on the territory of a member state, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrator.

The United States has sometimes supported the ICC, such as when the ICC’s top prosecutor sought the court’s ruling arrest warrant Russian President Vladimir Putin is suspected of committing war crimes in Ukraine. Like Israel and the United States, Russia is not a member of the court.

Prosecutor Karim Khan, who issued the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Galante, said his decision was in line with the court’s approach in all cases and said the warrants could prevent ongoing crimes.