“This is a deeply unhelpful development,” Mr Sunak said. “Of course, it is still subject to a final decision, but it remains deeply unhelpful nonetheless.”
“There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self-defence and the terrorist group Hamas. It is wrong to conflate and equivocate between those two different entities.”
The Prime Minister’s remarks echoed those of Joe Biden, who condemned the ICC’s effort to seek the arrest of Mr Netanyahu as “outrageous”.
Unlike Israel and the United States, the UK Government is a signatory to the ICC and would be obliged to respect any warrant should its subject visit Britain.
David Cameron, the Foreign Secretary, said that the ICC drawing a parallel between Israel and Hamas was “plain wrong”.
“Frankly I think this was a mistake in terms of position, in terms of timing, in terms of effect,” he said.
‘Other dominoes will fall’
Michael Gove, the cabinet minister, also slammed the decision, accusing the ICC’s chief prosecutor of seeking “to hold Israel to standards that we don’t hold other countries to”.
“You cannot equate Israel with Hamas,” he told Times Radio. “Hamas is a terrorist organisation, bent on slaughter. Israel is a state like all states: an imperfect one, but one that’s trying to defend its people, and trying to equate the two is just nonsensical.”
Speaking later at the JW3 Jewish Community Centre in north-west London he warned, “there can be no equivalence between them. And that moral position, I think, has to guide our response to the legal operation of the ICC”.
Mr Gove added that Russia, Iran and China were seeking to spread “anti-Semitic and anti-Israel narratives”.
“They know that if they undermine Israel, other dominoes will fall,” he said.
Germany both praised the ICC as a “fundamental achievement of the international community” and hit out at the “inaccurate impression of an equivalence” between Israel and Hamas.
An Israeli government spokesman on Tuesday urged the “civilised world” to unite against the ICC.