In a statement posted Monday, International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim AA Khan announced he has found “reasonable grounds to believe that Yahya SINWAR (Head of the Islamic Resistance Movement (‘Hamas’) in the Gaza Strip), Mohammed Diab Ibrahim AL-MASRI, more commonly known as DEIF (Commander-in-Chief of the military wing of Hamas, known as the Al-Qassam Brigades), and Ismail HANIYEH (Head of Hamas Political Bureau)” and “Benjamin NETANYAHU, the Prime Minister of Israel, and Yoav GALLANT, the Minister of Defence of Israel, bear criminal responsibility for the following war crimes and crimes against humanity” and goddamn this is going to get ugly.

Would’ve been much uglier if Khan had singled out Netanyahu and Gallant while ignoring Hamas, but he’s still going to catch hell for this. Republicans are going to absolutely lose their shit.

“Both-sides-ing” it was actually the smart thing to do here, much of a dirty word as it is. Hamas started this fucking nightmare with their utterly unspeakable massacre of innocent men, women, children, and babies on October 7th. Israel has acted with nothing less than malign depraved indifference to human life in a campaign of retaliation that has killed ten to twenty times as many Gazans than the number of Israelis murdered on the 7th – to say nothing of the millions displaced, starved, homes and businesses in ashes. All this godawful suffering for the political survival of an indicted dictator – now also a wanted war criminal who could end up effectively trapped in Israel for the rest of his life if the warrant is issued. Khan has started a shitstorm, but it’s a solid chess move politically to treat both groups of genocidal warlords as one and the same. Also morally true.