There are top IDF officials who are more concerned about the threat to Israel from the International Court of Justice than they are from the International Criminal Court, according to military sources.
It is unknown how universal this view is among top Israeli officials, but it is not an isolated view and could be said to be based on the huge amounts of time and energy that Israel is pouring into responding to a March 12 ICJ deadline for the Jewish state to respond to genocide charges.
One reason that IDF sources believe the ICJ could be worse than the ICC is because of the charge of genocide itself versus individual war crimes.
For the ICC, war crimes can be limited to an individual or to a limited series of events, but the ICJ can only issue a verdict of genocide if it decides that there is a systematic nationwide effort to perpetrate mass killing.
While genocide is much harder to prove than an individual war crime or a small series of such crimes, if proven, IDF sources warn that the consequences for Israel’s reputation of an ICJ genocide verdict, and the resultant diplomatic and economic fallout, could be much more severe and last for decades.
Confronting the ICJ challenge
In confronting the ICJ challenge, some non-legal military officials have warned that their job has not been made easier by the lack of organized, coherent, and systematic global messaging coming from the government.
Rather, IDF sources cautioned that the messages coming from senior Israeli officials are often chaotic, and those from some officials undermine significant hard work by the military to build trust and credibility worldwide.
While army sources would not name specific officials, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have been lightning rods throughout their terms, with many democratic countries banning them from visiting.
Although Defense Minister Israel Katz has not been publicly banned, he has angered foreign countries with some of his statements, including officials in the Trump administration, and has generally had a less influential global profile than his predecessors.
IDF officials sometimes see a provocative statement from some Israeli political officials, and would then fatalistically go on with their work, trying to improve Israel’s reputation by improving the Palestinians’ situation, knowing that the country would inevitably be hit with more anger in response to the statement.
Confronting false narratives
For much of the war, the military has also said that, beyond a few extreme incidents, it didn’t receive much consistent help from the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office in truly combating the anti-Israel war crimes narrative.
Further, IDF sources said that anytime Israel temporarily did a good job confronting false narratives or exaggerations against it, there was no follow-through, especially regarding starvation allegations.
The army hopes that the large comprehensive response being sent to the ICJ will make some impact regarding how Israel and its military are perceived globally.
On the flipside, IDF sources said that a number of humanitarian aid workers on the ground have admitted that many of the accusations of war crimes or starvation propagated by their bosses back at headquarters have been disproven.
These aid workers have indicated to the military that a lot of the messaging about war crimes at the top is impacted by broader political concerns, mainly to pressure Israel to end the war no matter the cost, including ignoring Hamas’s ongoing strength and how many Israeli hostages would be returned.
One of the largest examples from the war, where Israel was accused of massive war crimes, which never transpired, was the evacuation of Rafah in May 2025, the IDF said.
After being told that it would take several months to properly evacuate the Gazan civilian population from Rafah to avoid massive deaths all at once, the IDF managed to evacuate nearly the entire civilian population in around a week, it stated.
At some point, some American officials told the military that each tent for a Rafah evacuee should be pre-labeled for specific family members.
In response, the IDF said that this is not how such a situation would work in Gaza, and while many tents were provided for evacuees, they were not specifically labeled, and many of them simply brought their own tents with them.