The Hague on Trial

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor. A colleague said, “He thought he could do something to improve the court—to get the court back on the map.”Photo illustration by Joan Wong; Source photographs from Getty

The International Criminal Court, established in 2002, in the aftermath of the carnage in Rwanda and the Balkans, was designed to hold accountable future perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity. It got off to a slow start: during the court’s first two decades in operation, it issued fewer than forty public arrest warrants. Most targeted African strongmen or warlords; the court almost never took on the major international powers or their closest allies, and critics complained that it effectively punished the weak while sparing the strong. (A hundred and twenty-five states are party to a treaty recognizing the court, but the United States, Russia, China, and Israel aren’t among them.) The court is governed by an assembly of the participating states, and in 2021 it elected a new chief prosecutor, Karim Khan. A fifty-five-year-old British-born lawyer whose father emigrated from Pakistan, he had previously served as an Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, where he’d overseen a team investigating abuses committed by ISIS. Khan vowed to reënergize the I.C.C. by upholding its promise of equal justice for all.

Khan boasted to colleagues that, in his first three years on the job, he had obtained more than forty new warrants, some not yet public. Among the public warrants were orders for the arrest of Vladimir Putin and top Russian military leaders, for war crimes in Ukraine; the leaders of Hamas, for its murderous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023; and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and a former Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, for the willful killing of civilians in Gaza, and for employing the denial of food as a weapon of war.

The Israeli warrants were easily the most controversial the court had ever issued, and also the first against a close U.S. ally. (In 2020, the first Trump Administration had sanctioned the previous I.C.C. prosecutor for merely beginning an investigation of possible crimes by U.S. forces in Afghanistan; no Americans were ultimately charged.) But Khan seemed to relish the attention his actions received. He is short and stout, with a shaved head and a gray goatee, and his austere look fits his hard-charging reputation. For much of 2024, he allowed a documentary filmmaker to follow him around the world as he conducted various investigations. That May, on the day when he applied for the Israeli warrants, Khan sat for an interview at the court with Christiane Amanpour, of CNN. A lawyer who worked closely with Khan at the court told me, “He can be a bit of a bully, and he is an impulsive character, but he is a damn good lawyer, and he thought he could do something to improve the court—to get the court back on the map.” Instead, he has become enmeshed in a scandal that threatens to cripple it.

Khan’s life unravelled in the course of only a few hours. On the afternoon of October 17, 2024, he was sitting in a kebab restaurant in London, preparing to deliver a speech, when his phone rang. The caller was a thirtysomething Malaysian woman, a lawyer who’d been at the I.C.C. for seven years. She now worked as a special assistant to the prosecutor, and she had been open about her heartbreak over the suffering in Gaza. She said that she was speaking from her bed in her home in The Hague, where the court is based. The woman, who had told Khan that she was suffering from lupus, a respiratory infection, and debilitating depression, audibly vaped as she said that she needed time off to recover. Yet she soon made it clear that addressing health issues wasn’t the sole purpose of her call.

Five months earlier, shortly before Khan applied for the Israeli warrants, two others working at the court had told the I.C.C.’s human-resources department that the Malaysian woman had privately complained about Khan, saying that he had subjected her to multiple unwanted sexual advances. Members of an internal-oversight bureau had met with her; she’d declined to participate in an investigation or to answer questions, and had informed Khan of those decisions. The I.C.C. halted its inquiry, and she kept working for Khan.

Throughout that spring, American and European officials had been waging a pressure campaign to dissuade Khan from pursuing the Israeli warrants. A military adviser with ties to Western intelligence warned the court that Mossad had been attempting to penetrate the organization, and the Guardian and other news organizations reported that Mossad had spied on, hacked, and, allegedly, threatened I.C.C. officials. (Israeli officials denied the allegations.) Russia was also retaliating against the court, including by ordering Khan’s arrest. The Malaysian woman, in a text to Khan about her refusal to coöperate with the internal inquiry, sounded worried that political machinations might be driving the investigation, telling him that she refused to be “a pawn in some game I don’t want to play.”

Then, that fall, someone began a campaign to bring new attention to the months-old, secondhand reports about Khan. An anonymous e-mail account leaked one of the reports to journalists, and many attempted to contact the woman and the I.C.C. She didn’t respond, thus holding off the press, although the inquiries appeared to set off rumors at the court. In the phone conversation with Khan, the woman never referred to any sexual advances or other misconduct, but she lamented several times that she’d heard colleagues gossiping that she was either “obsessed” with him or, worse, an Israeli spy.

It was “humiliating” to be called “a Mossad plant,” she told Khan, according to a recording she made of the call. “I have basically lost any friend that I did have at the court. . . . I don’t know where to look anymore. . . . I just think it’s time for me to go.”

Khan warned her more than once of “wolves around us.” The call lasted an hour, and during it he asked six times if she was recording their conversation. (She lied and said no.) But his tone was supportive; he encouraged her to take the time off that she needed, and to get continued pay through medical leave. Occasionally, he sounded confident that he was innocent of any misconduct, reminding her repeatedly that it was her choice if she wanted to initiate a more comprehensive investigation, including of him. “The truth will come out,” he assured her. Yet, at other moments, he sounded anxious that she might pursue a complaint against him. He told her that speculation about this was “keeping things alive,” and he urged her to formally clarify that she had no intention of accusing him of inappropriate behavior. “Then it’s well and truly over,” he said, and the I.C.C. could end the “feeding frenzy” by telling journalists, “Fuck off now—leave her alone.”

“Things are being pushed,” Khan told her, by forces out to “get rid of the warrants for Palestine, get rid of the warrants for Russia, get rid of the whole court.” Khan and the Malaysian woman were both married, and he warned her that a misconduct scandal would not only harm the woman and her family, and Khan and his family. The “casualties” would also include “the justice of the victims that now, finally, are on the cusp of progress.”

Ninety minutes after the call ended, an anonymous X account began leaking details from the same secondhand report that had been included in the anonymous e-mail. Stories appeared in the media, including an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, on October 23, 2024, which reported that the woman had accused Khan of “locking her into his office and sexually touching her,” making “visits to her hotel room in the middle of the night, demanding to be let in,” and “claiming to have a headache and lying on her hotel bed, sexually touching her.” A few weeks later, the I.C.C.’s governing body requested an external investigation. By the time the U.N. began one, the woman was levelling an even more serious allegation: that Khan had repeatedly forced her into “coercive” sex. (Khan, who has denied any misconduct, declined requests for an interview.)

Selective leaks from the ambiguous phone call—in particular, Khan’s references to Palestinians and other victims being “on the cusp of progress”—have improbably bound together the woman’s allegation of sexual abuse with the international power struggle over the Israeli arrest warrants. Khan and his lawyers have contended that Netanyahu and his allies are exploiting a vulnerable woman in order to discredit the case against the Israeli leaders. Netanyahu, in turn, has repeatedly claimed that Khan sought the warrants only to divert attention from the woman’s charges.

Indeed, in a video interview in August with Breitbart, Netanyahu accused Khan of an elaborate scheme, claiming that, when Khan learned about the woman’s allegations, “he said, ‘I’m ruined. I have to get out of this somehow,’ so he decided the best way to get out of that was to hit the Jews, or to hit the Prime Minister of the Jewish state.” Dismissing the I.C.C. as “a completely corrupt organization,” and describing the female accuser as a Malaysian hostile to Israel, Netanyahu charged, without evidence, that the court had told her, “Listen, it’s more important to falsely accuse Israel of these war crimes than for your charges to be heard.”

The Trump Administration and Netanyahu allies in the Republican-led U.S. Congress have seized on the sexual-abuse allegations as part of a broader defense of Netanyahu and Gallant against the I.C.C. charges. Six days after the October 17th call and leak, Senator Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, announced that the woman’s claims had put “a moral cloud” over Khan’s decision to seek the warrants. President Trump, in a statement, has accused the court of “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel” which constitute “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” The U.S. has now sanctioned Khan, his two deputies, and several I.C.C. judges—freezing their assets, blocking their access to the U.S. financial system, and restricting their ability to enter the country. Several I.C.C. staffers with American ties resigned.

The international uproar over the sexual-abuse charges culminated in an article this spring in the Wall Street Journal, which reported the woman’s allegations and strongly suggested that Khan had sought the warrants as a tactical deflection. Six days later, Khan took a leave of absence that brought the work of the court to a virtual standstill.

The attempt to link the sexual-assault allegations and the Israeli warrants is at odds with many facts. Khan’s pursuit of the warrants was hardly new or secret. A team of lawyers in the prosecutor’s office had worked for several months on an investigation of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Because accusing Israel of grave misdeeds was so explosive—Khan described it to Amanpour as “the San Andreas Fault of international politics and strategic interests”—he had also, in January, 2024, made the unorthodox choice to solicit a second opinion from an outside panel of experts.

That panel included two former judges who had overseen international criminal tribunals, a former legal adviser to the British Foreign Office, and Amal Clooney, a British Lebanese human-rights lawyer and the wife of George Clooney. They concluded that there was sufficient evidence for charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity on both sides of the Gaza conflict, including at the top of the Israeli chain of command. The lawyers inside the I.C.C. prosecutor’s office agreed. The Hamas-led attack on October 7th had killed about twelve hundred people in Israel, including at least eight hundred civilians, and taken some two hundred and fifty hostages. By May, 2024, the Israeli assault on Gaza had killed upward of thirty-five thousand people, many of them women or children. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, at least thirty-two Palestinians, including twenty-eight children, had died of malnutrition or starvation at Gaza’s hospitals. An internationally recognized panel of experts was warning that more than a million Gazans could soon face catastrophic hunger. (The reported death toll has now exceeded sixty-six thousand; at least four hundred and fifty people have died of malnutrition or starvation, including a hundred and fifty-one children.)

When Khan spoke to Amanpour, he explained some of the reasoning behind the charges. Senior Israeli officials, he noted, had repeated “words like there’s no such thing as an innocent civilian in Gaza—they’re all responsible,” and neither Netanyahu nor Gallant had ever “disowned” those comments or “dissociated themselves.” Gallant had said that Israel was “fighting human animals” and imposing “a complete siege” with “no electricity, no food, no fuel”; Netanyahu had vowed “to exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel’s other enemies for decades to come.” On November 21, 2024, six months after Khan applied for the warrants, a pretrial chamber of the I.C.C., which consists of three judges, ruled that Khan had presented “reasonable grounds” that Netanyahu and Gallant “bear criminal responsibility” for the crimes of “starvation as a method of warfare”; “murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”; and “intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population.”

Khan has told investigators that he decided to seek the warrants in May, 2024, because of frustration with what he considered to be delaying tactics by Israel, which included dragging out talks about letting him visit Gaza to carry out investigations on the ground. His requested visit had been blocked or postponed for months, and around May 15th Israel failed to provide necessary documents for a visit to Gaza that Khan had planned for the end of that month. He had come to believe that the Israelis would never permit such a trip. (Since the assault began, Israel hasn’t allowed any outside journalists or rights monitors unfettered access to Gaza.)

What’s more, if Khan intended to defend himself from accusations of sexual misconduct by claiming that Israel was plotting against him, he hardly needed to announce the warrant applications. His steps toward those charges had been widely reported in the news media before May of 2024, and the fierce pushback from Israel and its allies was well known in diplomatic circles. According to official notes that Khan has provided to U.N. investigators, that April, Brett McGurk, then the top White House Middle East adviser, warned Khan in a phone call of disastrous consequences if he sought the Israeli warrants. David Cameron, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, told Khan that such a move would be a “hydrogen bomb.” On April 24, 2024, a dozen U.S. Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio, sent a letter to Khan overtly threatening him: “Target Israel and we will target you. . . . You have been warned.” The next day, the New York Post reported that Khan was poised to bring war-crimes charges against Netanyahu within days. Netanyahu reposted the article on social media and charged that the I.C.C. was attempting to undermine Israel’s “inherent right to self-defense.” According to an account that Khan shared with investigators of a conference call he had with U.S. senators, on May 1, 2024, Lindsey Graham told him, “You may as well shoot the hostages yourself,” adding, “This court is for Africans.” (Through a spokeswoman, Graham denied making the second statement, insisting he said only that the court was for places where the rule of law had collapsed.)

Yet, if the lawyers inside the prosecutor’s office broadly agreed about the grounds for charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, many of them disagreed sharply about how to proceed, primarily because of the American threats. (Khan’s accuser was one of those who had argued internally that he should move more slowly in making charges against Israeli leaders, and not rush to publicize high-level warrants.) Prosecutors usually sought warrants confidentially, to avoid putting political pressure on I.C.C. judges, and to give the states that recognize the organization a chance to arrest defendants who travelled inside their borders. (The I.C.C. lacks its own police force.) More important, several lawyers involved in the Gaza investigation contended that the singular nature of the I.C.C.—ostensibly a court of law, but also a relatively untested diplomatic construct—required a prosecutor to consider political realities in addition to international law. One lawyer told me that the I.C.C. “exists in a framework of international relations—states created us, so we have to be strategic.” After the I.C.C. issued a warrant against Putin, in 2023, the lawyer continued, “the court was riding high, in terms of relevance and reputation,” but on the subject of Israel “there were concerns that, if we went big in terms of defendants and types of crimes, it would have massive reverberations” in places such as Washington, which could “make things very difficult for us.” Another lawyer told me that the court simply couldn’t afford to ignore the wishes of the United States, “the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room.”

At the same time, lawyers who worked with Khan said that he felt enormous pressure to do something to try to stop the escalating slaughter of Palestinian civilians. Human-rights and Palestinian-advocacy groups were attacking him on social media for failing to act. Some activists labelled him a “genocide enabler,” and others were collecting signatures for an online petition that demanded his removal. Oona Hathaway, a Yale law professor, told me that, outside the U.S. and Israel, the lack of visible action “could also look like a very obvious omission, so there were risks to the court’s credibility in failing to seek arrest warrants.”

Khan, according to colleagues, argued internally that publicly announcing the warrant application might deter the Israelis from engaging in further war crimes. On CNN, he recalled that for months he had been publicly warning both sides of the conflict, “Comply now, don’t complain later.”

On April 29, 2024, as these tactical debates were playing out within the prosecutor’s office, Khan’s accuser burst into tears in front of a female colleague, and did so again, later that day, in the office of one of Khan’s senior advisers. The adviser, Thomas Lynch, was an American lawyer who had previously worked as Khan’s right hand at the U.N. Within the I.C.C., he was known as a skeptic of issuing high-level charges against the Israelis, and he had clashed with Khan the previous December over Lynch’s edits to a public statement from the chief prosecutor’s office about Gaza. Khan accused Lynch of inserting language preferred by the Israelis: the statement ended up describing Hamas as a “terror organisation” instead of as an armed group, and used the word “innocent” to describe the Israeli victims but not the Palestinians; the prosecutor’s office usually avoided making such judgments in press statements. (Lynch has told investigators that Khan had asked him to work with a senior Israeli contact while finalizing the statement, and noted that Khan had kept him on as the prosecutor’s liaison to Israel.)

According to people familiar with the initial, aborted sexual-misconduct investigation, the Malaysian woman had said nothing to colleagues about “coercive” sex. But she told both her female colleague and Lynch that Khan had made her work life intolerable with a long series of unwanted and physical sexual advances, which she described in detail. On May 2, 2024, Lynch and the female colleague told Khan that they felt obligated to pass her allegations to human resources.

The woman has told U.N. investigators she did not know that her confidants had informed Khan or the human-resources office until Sunday, May 5th, when she received a text from a representative of the I.C.C.’s internal-oversight bureau. A diplomat familiar with the inquiry told me that the bureau sought to speak to her before she returned to work that Monday, in order to protect her from being pressured by Khan at the office. But the text interrupted a family event, and the woman ended up meeting with I.C.C. investigators at a hotel restaurant, with her young son seated at a table a few feet away. She has told the U.N. investigators that she declined to answer questions because the context of the interview conveyed a lack of consideration for a potential victim. The diplomat, however, told me that bureau staff suspected another scenario: some at the I.C.C. had observed an unusual warmth between the woman and Khan, and a pattern of official travel together. This raised the possibility of an extramarital relationship gone sour.

According to records provided to the U.N. investigators, the woman texted Khan that Monday that she had “told them I have no interest in talking,” adding, “I just want to do my job and continue my professional work.” Khan sent back a boilerplate response, saying that he was “here if you need to talk,” and adding that she could also speak to one of his deputies. The oversight bureau, concluding that the woman would not participate in any inquiry, e-mailed Khan on May 7th, advising him to “minimise individual one-on-one contact” with her. A message the next day told him that there was “no need, at this stage,” for further investigation. On May 13th, the woman accompanied Khan to New York, for a meeting with the U.N. Security Council.

Khan had good reason to think that the drama of her allegations had ended there. But that fall, as the judges of the I.C.C. weighed an Israeli appeal of the warrant applications, someone launched the campaign to revive the woman’s allegations, in an apparent effort to undermine the war-crimes charges. The anonymous e-mail account began sending journalists copies of a four-page typed statement that Lynch had provided to the I.C.C.’s internal-oversight bureau, summarizing the woman’s initial allegations. In a note attached to this document, the sender claimed that Khan had sought “to cover up his personal mess” by seeking “to speed up his investigation of the war in the Gaza Strip—including a speedy process to request arrest warrants.” The sender added, falsely, that, after requesting the warrants, Khan, “as a preemptive measure,” had publicly “accused the Israeli ‘Mossad’ of threatening and blackmailing him.” Bizarrely, the sender then spoke up for Mossad: “It is my understanding that this never occurred and was just used as a cover up story and precaution shall this information of his sexual misconduct come up and be revealed.” The note listed the names and phone numbers of the accuser, Lynch, and several others at the I.C.C.; in the copy I obtained, there was also a single Hebrew word, for “telephones,” alongside some numbers.

Some of the journalists contacting Khan’s accuser for comment quoted Lynch’s statement to her. The woman has told U.N. investigators that, at about the same time, Khan and another court official close to him were pushing her to clarify that she had no intention of pursuing a complaint. Feeling pressured from many sides, the accuser has said, she began seeking confidential advice from a senior female diplomat in the multinational assembly that governs the I.C.C. The accuser also began recording some of her phone calls.

Then, on October 17, 2024, the anonymous X account appeared. Its handle was @ICC_Leaks. The account’s owner, claiming to be someone “personally familiar” with the court, described a “sexual harassment complaint” about “one of the most famous figures in international criminal law”—someone with the initials “KK”—which had been filed on May 4, 2024, and was still “being silenced.” The account repeated details from Lynch’s written statement and claimed that “no action has been taken,” adding, “Why do so many people know about this but are afraid to demand immediate action?”

It remains a mystery who was behind the anonymous e-mail and the X account. Khan has unconvincingly argued to U.N. investigators that his accuser was complicit, contending that the mere ninety minutes between the taped phone call and the posting from @ICC_Leaks indicate that she played a role. But the X postings included her initials, and the e-mail had included her full name and phone number. It is hard to imagine that she willingly exposed herself and her family to such public scrutiny. Officials in the human-resources department or the internal-oversight bureau could have leaked Lynch’s statement, but people in those offices had the ability to take action against Khan at any time without leaking—and nobody in those offices had an obvious interest in linking the allegations against Khan to the charges against Israel.

Were the e-mail and the X account part of an Israeli influence operation, or were the references to Mossad and the Hebrew letters heavy-handed misdirection? Some suspect that Lynch himself, or someone close to Lynch, played a role in the leak. He, of course, had a copy of his own statement. Records of communications on the day the X account appeared show that he’d met with the accuser shortly before her hour-long call with Khan, and colleagues of Lynch’s have told me he believed that Khan had announced the warrants to deflect the charges, just as the anonymous e-mail argued. But communications records also show Lynch expressing surprise when the leaks first emerged, and he has told investigators that he wasn’t responsible.

Whoever was behind the @ICC_Leaks account, it had the effect of tying the allegations against Khan to the charges against Israel. Six days after that leak, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which consistently supports Netanyahu, declared that the accusations could “throw into question Mr. Khan’s probity,” and further suggested that his “Israel-bashing”—“a reliable way to divert attention and pressure”—had been a cover for his misconduct. The Associated Press, citing “people close to Khan’s accuser,” reported that investigators for the I.C.C.’s oversight bureau had inappropriately tried to question the accuser in front of her child. By the end of October, both Khan and his accuser had requested an independent inquiry.

In December, Khan’s accuser sat for many hours of interviews with U.N. investigators. Among other submissions, she has provided nearly two hundred pages of texts between her and a friend. In these exchanges, she attested that she loved her job “90 percent of the time,” called Khan a difficult boss, and described her struggle with depression. But, in at least a few texts from the spring of 2024, she explicitly described sexual advances by Khan. “He wants to go on holiday or link a mission and stay on for a few days. I’m beautiful, the smell of my neck,” she wrote in a text that April, saying that she’d made an excuse to get away from him. (A person close to Khan said that U.N. investigators haven’t sought his response to any such evidence.)

The accuser has told the U.N. investigators that Khan sexually assaulted her in his office and coerced her into sex at his home, in The Hague, and during five trips together. Those accusations became public on May 10, 2025, when an article in the Wall Street Journal described graphic details from her testimony, which the publication reported it had reviewed. The article said that Khan’s accuser had testified, “He always holds on to me and leads me to the bed,” adding, “It’s the feeling of being trapped.”

The Journal article quoted Khan’s statement in the secretly taped October 17th phone call about “the victims that now, finally, are on the cusp of progress.” Citing that quote and echoing the paper’s earlier editorial, the article argued that the timing of his announcement about the Israeli warrants “has spurred questions about whether Khan was aiming to protect himself from the sexual-assault allegations.” The article also framed his decision to seek the warrants in May, 2024, as an abrupt swerve, emphasizing that Khan had been appreciative when senior White House officials had told him seventeen days before his announcement that they were still pressing the Israelis to let him into Gaza. Khan was then depicted as suddenly “canceling” a visit to Gaza, even though Israel had so far withheld the necessary travel documents.

In August, the Guardian reported that a former intern in Khan’s law office had also come forward, on condition of anonymity, to attest that, sixteen years ago, Khan had made repeated unwanted sexual advances. (The newspaper reported that she refused to have sex with him.) Through a lawyer, Khan denied the allegations.

Determining exactly what happened between Khan and his accuser may be a difficult task for the U.N. investigators. In addition to denying any sexual misconduct, Khan has told them that the allegations had no bearing on his decision about the warrants. People familiar with his arguments to the investigators told me that his defense has included communications showing his strong support for the woman when, in 2022, she had complained about another colleague, accusing him of saying something that she deemed to be sexual harassment. (An investigation, which concluded at the end of 2023, exonerated that colleague.) In correspondence that Khan made available to the investigators, his accuser appears to be very warm, prone to disclosure about her personal life and struggles, highly solicitous of Khan and his wife, and perhaps overeager. Even in the period immediately before and after she cried to colleagues, she sent Khan messages saying that she was glad to be on a mission with him and suggesting art work that he and his wife might buy for their home. Khan has given investigators a photograph showing that his office was always at least partially visible through an internal window from the office of his personal assistant. He has also argued that bodyguards could testify about his whereabouts, and that he had the flu on one trip when she alleges he assaulted her.

At the same time, people familiar with the investigation told me that Khan has devoted much of his defense to convincing investigators that Israel and its allies are exploiting the accuser in order to damage him and the court. Among other things, he has provided texts and notes documenting what he argues was a private threat he received last spring. On April 26, 2025, Nick Kaufman, a prominent British Israeli international lawyer friendly with Khan, texted him that he’d received a call from the Journal reporter, who “had heard, so he said, that I have been informally advising Gallant.” (A person familiar with the arrangement told me that Gallant has avoided formally retaining a lawyer, a step that would tacitly acknowledge the I.C.C.’s authority.) Kaufman commiserated to Khan about “snakes in the grass in your own office” and professed no interest in “the scandalous allegations people raise.” Then, noting that he had spoken that afternoon to a well-connected former Israeli deputy attorney general, Kaufman suggested meeting with Khan the following week at his office in The Hague. “I do have a bit of an insight into the Israeli mentality regarding the current state of litigation,” he said, offering “some information and an idea or two of a diplomatic kind.”