At least four anti-Israel agitators were hauled out of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing by Capitol police while Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified about his department’s budget on Tuesday. 

While Blinken began his opening statement, a man stood up shouting the name of a 6-year-old boy reportedly killed in Gaza. 

‘Blinken, you will be remembered as the Butcher of Gaza,’ the man yelled as officers pulled him out of the hearing room. ‘You will be remembered for murdering innocent Palestinians.’ 

As other protesters started to speak up, Chairman Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., instructed an officer to remove the individual.

Cardin warned that anyone who was speaking would be removed, but that did not deter an elderly woman who repeatedly shouted, ‘Stop the genocide,’ while being escorted out by police. 

Blinken began his prepared statement again, when a woman suddenly rushed toward his table shouting, ‘Blinken is a war criminal. He is a war criminal. The blood of 40,000 people is on his hands.’ 

‘The blood of 40,000 Palestinians is on his hands,’ she continued as Capitol police officers physically pulled her from the room. ‘He is a war criminal. He is a war criminal. Blinken is a war criminal.’ 

A fourth person, another female protester, was then removed while shouting, ‘Blinken, you are funding a genocide in Gaza. There have been seven mass graves outside of hospitals.’

 ‘This is sick. This is deranged. You are a war criminal. Shame on you,’ she yelled. 

Blinken is advocating before Congress for President Biden’s more than $60 billion budget request for the State Department and the Agency for International Development. Blinken is testifying before the Democrat-controlled Senate first, before the full Foreign Relations Committee, and later Tuesday, before the Appropriations subcommittee.

On Wednesday, the secretary of state is scheduled to return to the Capitol to testify before the Republican-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee and an appropriations subcommittee. 

During Blinken’s testimony, Cardin, joined by Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., John Fetterman, D-Penn., Jim Risch, R-Idaho, Katie Britt, R-Ala., and John Thune, R-S.D., released a statement condemning the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s decision to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister. ICC prosecutor Karim Khan also accused three Hamas leaders of war crimes and crimes against humanity

‘These actions by the ICC jeopardize efforts to bring about sustainable peace in the Middle East. It puts at risk sensitive negotiations to bring home hostages, including Americans, and surge humanitarian assistance,’ the bipartisan group of senators wrote. ‘The application for arrest warrants also draws a false equivalence between Israel with its longstanding commitment to the rule of law, and Hamas’ theocratic, autocratic, and unaccountable rule over Gaza. To state the obvious: Israel is a functioning democracy, while Hamas is a terrorist organization.’ 

Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Biden administration would be willing to work with Congress to respond to the ICC’s decision to pursue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders. 

‘The extremely wrongheaded decision by the ICC prosecutor yesterday, the shameful equivalence implied between Hamas and the leadership of Israel. I think that only complicates the prospects for getting such an agreement,’ Blinken said, referencing cease-fire talks. ‘We’ll continue to forge ahead to to do that. But that that decision, as you said, on so many levels, is totally wrong headed. And we’ll be happy to work with Congress, with this committee on an appropriate response.’ 

Former President Trump’s team is preparing to file a lawsuit against the makers of a biopic about his career in the 1980s.

A spokesperson for Trump called ‘The Apprentice’ – a 2024 film starring Sebastian Stan and directed by Ali Abbasi – a piece of ‘garbage’ and ‘pure fiction.’

‘We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers. This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,’ Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital.

‘As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked,’ Cheung said.

The film centers on Trump’s relationship with Roy Cohn, the McCarthy-era government lawyer who led investigations into suspected communists, portraying Cohn as a mentor for Trump in the hard-knocks world of New York City business and politics.

It includes a number of salacious and disturbing scenes involving Trump, Ivana Trump and other real-life figures.

‘This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,’ Cheung told Fox News Digital.

‘Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people – they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?’ Abbasi told reporters Tuesday at the Cannes Film Festival.

Abbasi went on to claim he would be willing to privately screen the movie for Trump if the former president was open to it.

‘I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and have a chat afterwards, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign,’ Abbasi said. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., deviated from some of his Democratic colleagues and jumped on board with International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan’s move Monday to file applications for arrest warrants against Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas leaders for allegedly committing ‘war crimes’ during the conflict in Gaza. 

‘The ICC prosecutor is right,’ Sanders said in a statement Monday afternoon on X. ‘These arrest warrants may or may not be carried out, but it is imperative that the global community uphold international law. Without these standards of decency and morality, this planet may rapidly descend into anarchy, never-ending wars, and barbarism.’

Sanders’ comments come hours after Democratic lawmakers came out largely divided over ICC’s petition.

Sanders also said that in the last several years, ICC issued arrest warrants for multiple political leaders who violated human rights laws and international war policies, including Russian President Vladimir Putin for the Ukraine invasion and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar for the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel. 

Now included on that list is Netanyahu, ‘who, in response, has waged an unprecedented war of destruction against the entire Palestinian people, which has killed or injured more than 5 percent of the population.’

Khan said in a statement Monday that based on evidence collected and examined by his office, he has ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe Netanyahu and Gallant ‘bear criminal responsibility for… war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of the State of Palestine.’ 

He said those alleged crimes include ‘starvation of civilians as a method of warfare’ and ‘intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.’ 

Meanwhile, House GOP lawmakers called the ICC’s petition for arrest warrants ‘a gift to terrorists around the globe.’ 

‘The ICC’s decision to equate Israel with Hamas as a war criminal is a gift to terrorists around the globe and a slap in the face to the only free-standing democracy in the Middle East,’ House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., the No. 3 House GOP lawmaker, told Fox News Digital. ‘There is no comparison between the deliberate killing, raping, and torturing of thousands of innocent civilians and those who are rightfully defending themselves against it.’

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a statement, ‘In the absence of leadership from the White House, Congress is reviewing all options, including sanctions, to punish the ICC and ensure its leadership faces consequences if they proceed. If the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.’

Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman and Liz Elkind contributed to this report. 

The State Department offered its condolences Monday after the deaths of two Iranian leaders, including the Islamic Republic’s president, a ‘baffling’ move considering Iran’s well-known human rights abuses, a human rights lawyer says.

In a statement, the agency expressed ‘its official condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and other members of their delegation in a helicopter crash in northwest Iran.’

‘As Iran selects a new president, we reaffirm our support for the Iranian people and their struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms,’ agency spokesperson Matthew Miller said.

Raisi and Amirabdollahian were killed Sunday after their helicopter crashed in the Dizmar Forest in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province on Sunday. Raisi was returning to Tehran after traveling to Iran’s border with Azerbaijan to inaugurate a dam with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev.

Iran’s state-run news agency, IRNA, said the crash killed eight people, including three crew members aboard the Bell helicopter, which Iran purchased in the early 2000s.

Raisi was nicknamed the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ for his oversight of mass executions of political prisoners in 1988, which forced Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to install interim leadership for Iran’s executive branch.

‘He’s been responsible for the incarceration, torture, rape and murder of tens of thousands of people over the last few decades,’ Gerard Filitti, senior counsel with the Lawfare Project, which provides pro bono legal services to protect the civil and human rights of Jewish people worldwide, told Fox News Digital. ‘Raisi is not a man who will be missed.’

‘While it is understandable for the State Department to issue condolences when there is the death of a foreign head of state, it’s baffling that someone who has such an atrocious record of violating human rights, supporting global terrorism, targeting the United States and allies, is someone who is receiving this outpouring of condolences, effectively from the United States government,’ he added. 

Fox News Digital has reached out to the State Department for further comment but has not yet heard back.

Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s minister of foreign affairs, said condolences to Raisi would be inappropriate given Tehran’s alliance with Russia.

‘I don’t feel comfortable sending condolences while Iran is sending drones that are used against civilians in Ukraine,’ he wrote on social media.

Iran, an Islamic theocracy, has long cracked down on dissent from its citizens and has been known for its human rights abuses, including jailing people for dancing, social media activity and women who break the country’s strict dress code. 

‘There’s no secret that Iran violates human rights. It’s a matter of its practice to rule according to its interpretation of religious law, and that leaves little room for what we understand as civil rights or human rights in the western democratic context,’ Filitti said. 

He noted that the Biden administration has embarked on a strategy of trying to appease Tehran with regard to nuclear deal negotiations and freeing up billions of dollars that Iran uses to conduct terror attacks and abuse its citizens.

‘It’s really troubling that now we’re seeing, effectively, a continuation of that. Both in offering condolences for the loss of Raisi, but mostly likely, continuing to work with the next regime on the same failed strategy of appeasement,’ said Filitti.

The United Nations Security Council also honored Raisi on Monday with a moment of silence. The observation came after a request from Russia, China and Algeria, Iran’s Permanent Mission to the U.N. said. 

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was asked by a reporter during a press briefing why the U.S. participated in the moment of silence for Raisi at the U.N. meeting. 

‘We have been quite clear that Ebrahim Raisi was a brutal participant in the repression of the Iranian people for nearly four decades. He was involved in numerous horrific human rights abuses, including playing a key role in the extrajudicial killing of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. Some of the worst human rights abuses occurred during his tenure as president, especially the human rights abuses against the women and girls of Iran,’ Miller explained. ‘That said, we regret any loss of life. We don’t want to see anyone die in a helicopter crash. But that doesn’t change the reality of his record, both as a judge and as the president of Iran.’

‘The Iranian government & people express gratitude for the UNSC’s condolences & solidarity,’ the mission posted on X. 

U.S. Senate Chaplain Barry Black also acknowledged Raisi’s death during his invocation. 

‘And Lord, we pray for the Iranian people who mourn the death of their president,’ he said.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Monday called for ‘decent nations’ to defund the International Criminal Court (ICC) after a court prosecutor filed applications for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Hamas leaders for alleged ‘war crimes.’ 

Prosecutor Karim Khan said his office had collected evidence to give ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe Netanyahu and Gallant ‘bear criminal responsibility for… war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on the territory of the State of Palestine.’ 

Khan said those alleged crimes include ‘starvation of civilians as a method of warfare’ and ‘intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population.’  

He said he is also seeking arrest warrants for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, its top political leader Ismail Haniyeh, and its military commander Mohammed Deif. 

Bennet said the prosecutor’s request was ‘a moment of shame for the ICC and the world community’ and provided ‘a huge boost to global Jihadi terror.’

‘An ICC that compares the executor of a deliberate murderous attack that included raping women and burning babies, with those who are defending themselves against it, is better off not existing,’ Bennett said. ‘It’s time for the decent nations to defund the ICC.’ 

He included the hashtag: ‘DefundTheICC.’

Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders condemned the move as disgraceful and antisemitic. U.S. President Joe Biden also lambasted the prosecutor and supported Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas.

A panel of three judges will decide whether to issue the arrest warrants and allow a case to proceed. The judges typically take two months to make such decisions.

Israel is not a member of the court, so even if the arrest warrants are issued, Netanyahu and Gallant do not face any immediate risk of prosecution. But the threat of arrest could make it difficult for the Israeli leaders to travel abroad.

Fox News Digital’s Greg Norman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.