The court documents come after Middle East Eye revealed earlier this month that the Biden administration was mulling submitting an amicus curiae to the ICC, voicing its staunch opposition to the decision of the court’s chief prosecutor to seek arrest warrants for the Israeli officials.

On Monday, the ICC released court filings that showed the US government has joined more than 60 states, entities and individuals asking to file a brief on the case.

The Biden administration joins an eclectic group that includes the Kingdom of Norway, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, US Senator Lindsey Graham, and a French lawyer who claimed he was submitting a brief on behalf of Hamas.

The ICC allows an amicus curiae to be filed by a state, NGO or an individual. It’s unclear whether the briefs will sway the ICC, but the sheer number of briefs is likely to delay the ICC’s decision on whether or not to issue arrest warrants for weeks.

The court has ruled that observations on the case should not be longer than 10 pages and must be filed by 6 August.

The US’s move to weigh in is notable because it had previously lobbied the UK to challenge the court as well. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken personally asked his UK counterpart, David Lammy, to continue challenging the court’s jurisdiction over Israeli citizens at a Nato summit in July, MEE reported.

Unlike the UK, the US is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in 2002.

The unprecedented interest in the ICC deliberations reflects how the court’s decision could reverberate across the globe.

For advocates of Palestine, chief ICC prosecutor Karim Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s defence minister alongside Hamas officials in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, was a watershed moment for international law.

Israel has slammed the move and the US made no secret of its objection to the prosecutor’s decision, saying it created a false sense of equivalency between Hamas – which the US deems a terror organisation – and its closest Middle East ally, Israel.

Israel, which asked the UK to start its legal challenge against the ICC, a US official told MEE, did not petition to file its own brief, but the Palestinian Authority did.

Separately, ICJ issued an advisory opinion on Friday that declared Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank unlawful and in breach of laws against apartheid.

Israel has also begun offering polio vaccinations to its troops fighting in Gaza after remnants of the virus were found in test samples from the region.

Ayadil Saparbekov, WHO team lead for health emergencies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, said circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 had been isolated from environmental samples from sewage.

“There is a high risk of spreading of the circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus in Gaza, not only because of the detection but because of the very dire situation with the water sanitation,” he told reporters in Geneva via video link from Jerusalem.

“It may also spill over internationally, at a very high point.”

He added that workers from WHO and the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, were scheduled to arrive in Gaza on Thursday to collect human stool samples as part of a risk assessment.

Saparbekov stated he hoped this would be completed before the end of the week and allow recommendations to be issued, “including the need for a mass vaccination campaign as well as what kind of vaccine should be used and what the age group of the population that will need to be vaccinated”.

Since Israel began its bombardment of Gaza in October, there have been repeated warnings about the possible outbreak of viral epidemics as a result of the destruction of health, water and sewage infrastructure.

Saparbekov stressed he was “extremely worried about an outbreak happening in Gaza”.

“And this is not only polio, different outbreaks of communicable diseases,” he explained.

The meeting was hosted by Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan and attended by the White House’s top Middle East official, Brett McGurk, State Department counsellor Tom Sullivan, and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, according to Axios.

The meeting came on the heels of an opinion article published in The Financial Times that backed the deployment of a temporary international force in Gaza to provide “law and order”.

Lana Nusseibeh, the UAE’s former ambassador to the United Nations, now an assistant minister for political affairs in the UAE, said an international force could be sent to Gaza at the invitation of the Palestinian Authority as part of efforts to achieve a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

It was not immediately clear why the UAE decided to lay out its vision for the Gaza Strip a day before the previously undisclosed meeting with senior US and Israeli officials.

But at least some of Nusseibeh’s pre-conditions for a peacekeeping force in Gaza appear to contradict the stated positions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

Nusseibeh, who hails from a prominent Jerusalem family, said an international force would not bring stability to Gaza unless Israel lifts its blockade of the Gaza Strip and ends settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.

Her call for the international force to be a stepping stone towards a two-state solution also directly challenges the Israeli Knesset, which overwhelmingly voted to reject a Palestinian state last week.

Analysts are sceptical about whether the US can recruit Persian Gulf states to provide security and reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, particularly as Israel continues to batter the enclave and talks on a ceasefire stall. However, privately, US and Arab officials who have spoken to MEE suggest that some tentative progress has been made.

The US is working on crafting a plan for post-war Gaza security that would see a US-backed mission led out of Cairo, Egypt. Last month, Middle East Eye reported that the US was weighing plans to shift the Palestinian Authority’s security forces into CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. Israel was placed under CENTCOM’s area of responsibility in 2021.

A senior US defence official previously told MEE that Bahrain told the US it would be willing to deploy peacekeepers to the blockaded territory. Manama’s police and security forces are staffed by many Pakistanis and Jordanians of Palestinian descent.

The FT’s opinion article suggests that the UAE no longer sees discussing its participation in a temporary international force as a private matter.

That represents a sharp turnaround from May when the UAE issued a statement pushing back against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Israel had made progress with the Persian Gulf State in taking part in the administration of the Gaza Strip after the war.