Por Michael Leonardi
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| Photo by m. |
On Wednesday, 11 November 2026, a delegation of U.S. taxpayers and international human rights attorneys will arrive at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They will hand-deliver evidence to the Office of the Prosecutor and call for arrest warrants against President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other senior U.S. officials for aiding and abetting Israel in the commission of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
The action is historic and unprecedented. U.S. citizens, acting as taxpayers whose money has financed the weapons and the political cover, are placing the highest officials of their own government before the Court that was created to prosecute the gravest crimes when national systems refuse to act.
The submission rests on nearly a year of work by individuals and organizations now organized as the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide (TAAG). It includes sworn affidavits from doctors who worked in Gaza, firsthand eyewitness accounts, whistleblower testimony, videos, and extensive documentation of U.S. political, military, diplomatic, and financial support. The delivery follows a federal court victory that protected TAAG’s First Amendment right to share that evidence with the Court, after the Trump administration had moved to block cooperation with the ICC through sanctions and executive order.
Israeli officials have already described the dependence. In September 2024 a senior Israeli Air Force official told Haaretz that Israel would have struggled to sustain the war for more than a few months without U.S. weapons. In October 2024 former Mossad intelligence director Zohar Palti told The Washington Post: “Without the U.S. weapons, Israel cannot fight.”
The delegation’s message is direct: those who finance, arm, and abet genocide are not above international law.
International law remains the only binding framework through which state and non-state actors can be held to account for mass atrocity. It is not a suggestion or a diplomatic courtesy. It is the body of rules—treaties, customary norms, and the statutes of international courts—that define genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes and that establish the duty of states to prevent and punish them.
Only through its actual implementation and application can those responsible be brought before a tribunal, their acts named, and the impunity that has shielded them broken. That framework is now under sustained attack. The United States and Israel have moved to delegitimize the International Criminal Court, sanction its officials, and criminalize those who document or support accountability for the genocide in Gaza.
The sanctions imposed by the U.S. in 2025 on UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese after the presentation of her report on corporate complicity, and the most recent verbal assault when she presented her report on media complicity, are part of the same campaign. So are the broader efforts to treat any cooperation with international legal institutions as hostile. Without the enforcement of international law, the crimes continue with the protection of the states that supply the weapons and the political cover.
The press conference that accompanies the submission will be held at the Hague Marriott. Francesca Albanese will deliver the keynote. The legal team includes Curtis Doebbler and Maria Kari.
Co-founders Tariq Ra’ouf, a Palestinian-American organizer who has lost dozens of family members in Gaza, Mohammad Ali, and Anna Marie Stenberg, a lifelong human rights advocate of Lebanese descent, will speak. Huwaida Arraf, the Palestinian-American attorney and co-founder of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition who has sailed repeatedly to break the siege, will be present.
So will Susan Abulhawa, the Palestinian-American novelist whose Mornings in Jenin became an international bestseller and who founded Playgrounds for Palestine. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, the trauma surgeon who has twice worked in Gaza hospitals under fire, and David McIntosh, the former Gaza Humanitarian Foundation manager, will provide expert witness.
Jacqueline Luqman of the Black Alliance for Peace and Lamis Deek, Director of Legal and Diplomatic Affairs for the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation Law Commission, will address the broader political stakes. Solidarity statements will come from Veterans for Peace, American Muslims for Palestine, Al-Haq legal advisor Ahmed Abofoul, and others.
Their presence is not ornamental. These are people who have treated the wounded, sailed toward the blockade, written the literature of dispossession, and organized against the use of U.S. tax dollars for the weapons. They are now using the Court the United States helped create and has since tried to destroy.
The submission targets the current administration. It also opens the record for what came before. The same chain of supply, the same diplomatic cover, and the same refusal to condition aid on compliance with international law ran through the Biden administration and the tenure of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Israeli officials’ admissions about dependence on U.S. weapons apply across both presidencies. The evidence being delivered to The Hague establishes a method and a precedent. Once the Prosecutor is seized of the material concerning Trump and Rubio, the same categories of documentation—arms transfers, diplomatic obstruction, intelligence sharing, and public statements of unconditional support—exist for the prior term.
Accountability does not stop at the current White House. The Court has already issued warrants for Israeli officials. The evidence now being delivered asks it to examine the chain of supply and decision that has kept those operations running, under both the present and the previous administration.
The submission does not end the genocide. It does not reverse the destruction already carried out. It records, in the language of international law, the specific role of senior U.S. officials in enabling it, and it places that record before the body charged with investigating the gravest crimes.
For years the same governments that invoke the rules-based order have treated the rules as optional when the accused are their own. The taxpayers traveling to The Hague are insisting that the option no longer exists. No more impunity for those who finance, arm, aid, and abet genocide. The Court has the evidence. The question is whether it will use it—against the officials in office now, and against those who held the same powers before them.
Link to the press conference livestream.
Michael Leonardi lives in Italy and can be reached at michaeleleonardi@gmail.com
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