Marco Rubio
Marco RubioReuters

US Senator Marco Rubio's Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination by President-elect Donald Trump for the position of Secretary of State was held today (Wednesday).

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman James Risch asked Rubio during the hearing about the International Criminal Court's recent decision to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

"I think the ICC has done tremendous damage to its global credibility. First of all, it is going after a non-member state" Rubio responded. He criticized ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan's claims that the ICC has the right to go after non-member states.

"I think ... that the whole premise of his prosecution is flawed," Rubio said, "beyond the process of it and the precedent that it sets, which is a very dangerous precedent for the United States of America, by the way, because this is a test run. This is a trial run to see, 'Can we go after a head of state from a nation that's not a member?' If we can go after them and we can get it done with regards to Israel, they will apply that to the United States at some point. And in fact, there have been threats to do so in the past."

"But the premise of the prosecution itself is completely and utterly flawed," he explained, noting that the ICC's issuing of warrants against October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar was meaningless because Sinwar did not travel around the world to places where he could have faced the possibility of arrest. "Second of all, the moral equivalency piece of it was offensive."

He recounted the events of October 7. "Hamas carried out an atrocious operation. They sent a bunch of savages into Israel with the express and explicit purpose of targeting civilians. They went into concerts, they went into these music festivals. They knew that there were no soldiers at the music festival. They knew that these were teenagers and young families when they went into different communities and kibbutzes and the like, and they deliberately targeted civilians. Deliberately. In fact, they kidnapped the ones they didn't murder, the families who they didn't eviscerate, the people whose skulls they didn't crack open, they kidnapped. And to this day they continue to hold innocents that they took in a deliberate operation."

"How can any nation-state on the planet coexist side by side with a group of savages like Hamas," he wondered. "They have to defend their national security and their national interests."

Rubio noted that in contrast to Hamas, Israel "didn't target civilians."

"There is a difference between those who in the conduct of armed action deliberately target civilians and those who do as much as they can to avoid civilians being caught up [while fighting] against an enemy that doesn't wear a uniform, against an enemy that hides in tunnels, against an enemy that hides behind women and children and puts them at the forefront and uses them as human shields. That;s who Hamas is. There is no moral equivalency, and I think the ICC, if they don't drop this, will find its credibility globally badly damaged. And I believe the United States should be very concerned, because I believe this is a test run to applying it to American service members and American leaders in the future," Rubio said.