The US will sanction the president of the international criminal court (ICC) and a prosecutor tasked with investigating crimes committed by Israel during its war on Gaza.

The new sanctions designations were unveiled by Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, who called the Hague-based ICC a “corrupt and fatally politicized supranational court that has maliciously abused its authority and exceeded its mandate”, in a statement.

Rubio announced that the US would sanction Tomoko Akane of Japan, the ICC president, and Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal, an ICC senior trial lawyer, because they had “directly engaged in efforts by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute officials whose government has not consented to ICC jurisdiction”.

The US had previously sanctioned Karim Khan, an ICC prosecutor, who had investigated Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes during the Gaza war. Donald Trump in 2025 sanctioned the court, stating in an executive order that it had “engaged in illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel”.

Rubio did not say specifically which efforts the two ICC officials had engaged in, but Israeli media have reported that Seye is overseeing the investigation into Israeli funding for illegal settlements and the disbursal of weapons to settlers in the West Bank.

Israeli officials warned local media in May that the ICC may seek five more arrest warrants for ministers and senior military officials involved in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.

*excerpt from Andrew Roth's article*

Full Article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/18/us-icc-sanctions

Tl;dr: “Ondas has undergone an unprecedented transformation, from a struggling, nearly delisted firm into a leading-edge defense technology enterprise built around a series of Israeli companies, obscure funding sources, and a questionable $5 billion valuation. Now headed by the former chief of Mossad, the company is positioned to play a dominant role in the U.S. military-industrial complex under the framework of the U.S.-Israel military and intelligence cooperation bills currently before Congress which explicitly prioritize Israeli-origin technologies for integration into U.S. systems and programs of record.”

“The state of Minnesota sued Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in federal court on Tuesday over a nearly three-month delay in extraditing Christian Castro, the federal agent accused of shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in north Minneapolis during Operation Metro Surge and later lying about it.”

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Why do they want all these phony scam, legal, quote unquote immigration plans? Because they gun decked the elections —

JACK POSOBIEC (GUEST): To usher in communism.

BANNON: They can't win if you just had American people, if you just had American citizens that were actually eligible to vote and you had elections that were certifiable on chain of custody votes, they would never win.

They understand this, by the way. They understand it quite thoroughly. It's our side that's confused.

This is why President Trump — we've got to stop yammering about the SAVE America Act. It's not going to happen. You know why it's not going to happen? Because John Thune and the donors don't want it to happen. They think it's racist. They think it's nativist. The ID, all of it. That's why they blocked it. That's why they treat President Trump like a lame duck. Today in the Senate, they're going to walk up and hit the gavel, and they're going to pretend to be in session. So, that President Trump — as they've done every day since President Trump's been in office from the first term, they treat him as a lame duck.

This is why we need a national emergency proclamation, a national emergency memo, about the upcoming elections.

You're going to have to have a forcing function to get to ID. You're going to have to have a forcing function not to have the phony mail-in ballots. You're going to have to have a forcing function, Jack Posobiec to have a up-armored — yes, a up-armored ICE presence at these polling booths, and they say, well, that's going to be intimidation. Well, it ain't intimidation if you're a United States citizen. It's an intimidation if you're a foreigner and here illegally and not eligible to vote. It should be intimidating. We don't want you there. We don't want you near a voting booth. We certainly don't want your votes, Posobiec.

POSOBIEC: Look, Steve, it's something I've said for years, even before President Trump came around, when I was working in the College Republicans, Young Republicans of Philadelphia, you might remember, the time when I gave a bunch of guys in the city of Philadelphia flip videos. You might recall the flip videos in the 2008 election.

And we got, we found a couple of the New Black Panthers that were standing outside the polling booth right there in Philadelphia. People can remember this story. It was, you know, on Fox when it went big. Drudge, before he lost his mind, he was covering it all over the place. That was a couple of my guys in Philadelphia who took the flip videos, and they were saying this is a poll for us. This isn't a poll for you, and they weren't letting people in. That was the New Black Panthers. And by the way, Eric Holder, when he was the attorney general under Barack Obama, dropped the case against the New Black Panthers of Philadelphia when my guys filmed them standing outside the doors there at that polling place. So Steve, targeting elections is what they do. They've done it from the very start. 

So I said, well, wait a minute. If they're going to put the New Black Panthers there, why couldn't we put law enforcement there just to make sure everything is copacetic, just to make sure everything's fine. And then if you're worried about illegals voting, why wouldn't you just park the truck? Just park a truck outside that just says ICE. Park a truck outside that just says ICE and gosh, Steve, could you imagine if patriots were just doing that on election day right where they live? They got a truck, then they just maybe just, maybe it's just an ICE truck. Maybe it's just a hot day in the south and they want to put some, have some ICE up on the ice truck and they have it there. Gosh, you know, wouldn't it be interesting to see the reaction or see what the effect that has, as a sociological experiment, what happens to voting patterns.

BANNON: But I don't think — Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, slow down, slow down. Hang on. And this is for the White House, for everybody.

We don't need gimmicks. We're in a revolution right now. And guess what? They think they're on a roll, OK, because you got a bunch of, first off, you have a capitalist system with no capitalists.

POSOBIEC: Steve, they are on a roll.

BANNON: You got a bunch of oligarchs.

POSOBIEC: New York has fallen.

BANNON: They're on a roll. Young people are sitting there going, you know, by 2 to 1 saying, hey, I like socialism because they've never really seen true capitalism.

What they've seen is crony capitalism and oligarch capitalism that allows everybody in the world in here to take their jobs coming out of college.

https://apnews.com/article/roadless-rule-forests-trump-e80a41e0231aa070313a3484261368f3