Open Letter to the European Union on Lebanon

Our Agreement: The Acts That Demand Accountability

Drawing upon the same body of law you yourselves invoked-the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the United Nations Charter, and customary international humanitarian law-we share your assessment that the following actions, committed during the renewed military operations against Lebanon, demand formal legal classification and prosecution:

• Indiscriminate Attacks on Civilian Populations - The bombardment of densely populated districts of Beirut and southern Lebanese villages, including strikes that, by the High Representative’s own assessment, “killed hundreds in a single night” and made it “hard to argue that such heavy-handed actions fall within self-defence.”
• Mass Civilian Casualties and Forced Displacement - More than 1,400 Lebanese civilians killed in a single month and more than one million people displaced, in a country whose population is barely five million, constituting destruction wholly disproportionate to any identifiable military objective.
• Attacks on UN Peacekeepers - Repeated and documented Israeli fire on UNIFIL contingents, including the Italian convoy fired upon in March 2026, in grave violation of the protections afforded to United Nations peacekeeping personnel under international law and Security Council Resolution 1701.
• Violation of an Internationally Brokered Ceasefire - Operations conducted in defiance of the US-Iran ceasefire that, according to the brokering parties, was understood to extend to Lebanon, undermining the very architecture of conflict resolution that the international community had labored to construct.
• Collective Punishment of the Lebanese Civilian Population - Sustained destruction of housing, hospitals, water systems, and civilian infrastructure across southern Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley, amounting to the imposition of conditions of life designed to render entire regions uninhabitable.
• Failure to Distinguish and Failure to Take Precautions - The systemic disregard for the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution that lie at the heart of international humanitarian law, evidenced in the very pattern of strikes that European foreign ministries have publicly described as “unacceptable.”

These are not matters of legitimate self-defense, nor of ordinary political disagreement. They are crimes of the highest order under the very treaties that the European Union and the United States both helped to draft and ratify.

Our Advisory: Issue Warrants and Activate the Full Architecture of International Justice

In full agreement with your joint condemnation, and in the spirit of the legal traditions our nations share, I respectfully advise the European Union and its member states to take the following concrete steps without further delay:

1. Issue National Warrants for War Crimes - Member states with universal jurisdiction statutes-including Belgium, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany-should open formal criminal investigations and, where the evidence so warrants, issue national arrest warrants against the political and military officials most directly responsible for the documented attacks on Lebanese civilians and on UNIFIL peacekeepers.
2. Recognize and Apply the ICC Warrants Already Issued - Every EU member state, as a State Party to the Rome Statute, must publicly affirm its legal obligation to execute every warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including those already issued against senior Israeli officials, and including any future warrants relating to operations in Lebanon. There can be no carve-out, no quiet exception, no waiver granted to any visiting head of state or minister.
3. Refer the Lebanon File to the ICC Prosecutor - Submit a coordinated State Party referral to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requesting an investigation specifically scoped to the 2026 operations in Lebanon, including the strikes on UNIFIL personnel, and demand that the Prosecutor issue preservation orders to all third states holding evidence.
4. Convene a UN Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry - Use the European bloc’s diplomatic weight at the Human Rights Council to convene a standing, independent Commission of Inquiry empowered to identify individuals-military, political, and corporate-whose conduct meets the threshold of war crimes.
5. Suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement - Honor the call already made by Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, France, and Sweden by suspending, through qualified majority where necessary, the cooperation agreements that materially sustain the very operations you have condemned. Words without economic and diplomatic consequences are, in the end, only words.

Our Pledge: The 2029 Executive Order on Extradition and Accountability

Should the gatekeepers of international justice once again falter, and should the United States itself be tempted to shield those responsible behind the doctrine of sovereign immunity, I make the following solemn pledge to you and to the people of Lebanon:

In the first week of my administration in 2029, I will sign an Executive Order establishing a Task Force on War Crimes Cooperation and Lawful Extradition, vested with full investigative and subpoena powers, with a binding mandate to:

• Honor Every Lawful ICC Warrant Without Exception - If the International Criminal Court has issued, or shall issue, an arrest warrant for war crimes or crimes against humanity against any individual-regardless of nationality, rank, office, or political affiliation-my administration will recognize that warrant and permit extradition from United States soil. No claim of immunity, no past or present office, will shield those credibly accused of war crimes from the justice they so eagerly dispense to others.
• Honor Every Lawful Warrant Issued by EU Member States - If a member state of the European Union, acting under its domestic universal-jurisdiction statutes, issues a warrant against any party implicated in the documented attacks on Lebanon or on UNIFIL forces, my administration will direct the Task Force to investigate the charges thoroughly and impartially. Where the investigation confirms the findings, I will authorize the extradition of every party involved-up to and including a former President of the United States.
• Cooperate Fully with European and Lebanese Investigators - Open the relevant U.S. military, diplomatic, and corporate records to lawful European and Lebanese investigative requests, subject only to the narrowest legitimate national-security review, and never as a mechanism for impunity.
• Identify and Sanction U.S. Persons Materially Complicit - Identify every U.S. official, defense contractor, and corporate entity whose conduct materially contributed to violations of international humanitarian law in Lebanon, and pursue every available administrative, civil, and criminal remedy under U.S. law.

The American People Stand With You

Lest the European Union’s leadership wonder whether this letter speaks only for one citizen, allow me to place before you the most current and credible polling data from the United States, which together describe an American public that has decisively turned in your direction:

• 60% of all U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of the State of Israel, according to the Pew Research Center’s March 2026 survey of 3,507 American adults-up seven points in a single year and nearly twenty points since 2022.
• 59% of all U.S. adults report little or no confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do the right thing in world affairs, an increase of seven points in one year and nearly twenty points since 2023.
• 80% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 69% in 2025 and 53% in 2022.
• 57% of Republicans under the age of 50 now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 50% just one year prior-demonstrating that the shift is generational and bipartisan.
• Roughly three in four Democrats support ending U.S. weapons transfers to Israel, and an overwhelming Democratic majority in the United States Senate has now voted, in what observers have called a historic shift, to block specific arms sales to Israel.
• Even among American Jews, approximately 56% now report little or no confidence in Mr. Netanyahu, according to the same Pew survey.

Translated into raw numbers, the 60% figure represents approximately 158 million American adults who, in this moment, look upon the conduct of the Israeli government with disapproval. That is a constituency larger than the entire population of every nation but a handful in the world. They are not anti-Israel; they are not antisemitic; they are not partisans of any foreign power. They are Americans who believe, as you do, that international law must mean something.

These are the Americans whose voices you hear when I write you today. They are the citizens on whose behalf I make this pledge. They are the electorate that will, God willing, place me in the office of the presidency in 2029, with a clear mandate to align United States foreign policy with the most basic precepts of international humanitarian law.

Why This Must Be Done

I make this pledge because the same machinery that laid waste to Iraq, that shattered Libya, that now tightens its grip on Iran and on Venezuela, has for more than a year turned its full weight upon Lebanon. It is always sold as a mission of self-defense or a strike against terror. But its true signature is the same in every theater: the destruction of a sovereign people’s infrastructure, the displacement of its civilians, and the conversion of foreign tragedy into domestic political and economic advantage.

The legal classification of these acts as war crimes is not a political slogan. It is the only shield the weak have against the strong, and the only language that transcends the brute arithmetic of power. Europe understands this in a way that few other regions can. You built the modern law of armed conflict atop the ashes of your own continent’s catastrophes, precisely so that no people, anywhere, would again be reduced to numbers in a casualty report.

Do not let the world forget Lebanon. Do not let the evidence vanish into the digital void. Collect it. Protect it. Send it to The Hague. And know that, when the door is opened, a very different United States government will be waiting on the other side-not with bunker-buster bombs, but with subpoenas, forensic audits, truth commissions, and the full constitutional force of a presidency that understands that justice, in the end, must begin at home.

And when that day comes, no individual-no matter what office they once held, no matter how unreachable they once seemed-will stand beyond the reach of the law and the will of the people they wronged.