Israel's far-right finance minister did not wait a single hour after learning of a secret ICC arrest warrant request before signing an order to bulldoze a Palestinian Bedouin village that the court itself had previously warned Israel not to touch.
Bezalel Smotrich held a press conference in Jerusalem on 19 May 2026, confirming he had been informed the night before that the International Criminal Court's prosecutor had secretly submitted an arrest warrant application against him, reportedly targeting his aggressive expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
