The case doesn’t start in The Hague.
It begins in a bombed road in Gaza, the place a lawyer kneels to write down down a title earlier than the physique is buried. It begins with a jail go to, the place a detainee can not but say what has been completed to her physique. It begins in a fieldworker’s pocket book, a scar photographed, a testimony taken in whispers, a file carried out of a place the place everybody is aware of that proof itself is harmful.
Lengthy earlier than the Worldwide Legal Courtroom (ICC) issued arrest warrants in November 2024 towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after which Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Palestinian lawyers and human rights organisations had already constructed the archive of proof the world is now being requested to confront.
They documented torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, assaults on hospitals, the killing of youngsters and the destruction of total households. They did this for years whereas being smeared, raided, surveilled, closed by navy order, labelled “terrorists”, threatened, exiled and ignored.
The folks making an attempt to make the regulation communicate have had to take action whereas beneath assault themselves.
Tahseen Elayyan of Al-Haq describes the method. His organisation, one of many oldest Palestinian human rights teams, gathers testimony straight from victims and witnesses, preserves no matter proof could be saved, and turns these fragments into experiences and authorized submissions for courts, together with the ICC.
That work, he says, is precisely why Al-Haq is focused.
“My organisation has been designated as a terrorist organisation [in 2021] due to the work that we do,” he says. “The organisation is closed by a navy order, however we’re nonetheless working from the workplace.”
The identical sample runs throughout Palestinian civil society. In 2021, Israel designated six Palestinian rights teams – Al-Haq, Addameer, Protection for Kids Worldwide-Palestine, Bisan Middle, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees and the Union of Palestinian Girls’s Committees – as “terrorist” organisations. In August 2022, Israeli forces raided and sealed their workplaces in Ramallah within the occupied West Financial institution. UN consultants and main rights teams condemned the transfer as an assault on the folks documenting abuses.
Protection for Kids Worldwide-Palestine had spent years gathering affidavits from youngsters who had been detained, interrogated, overwhelmed and shot. “As a substitute of opening an investigation into these allegations, the Israeli authorities raided the DCI workplace,” says Ayed Abu Eqtaish, its accountability director. “As a substitute of investigating these allegations, there was stress on the organisation that exposed this info.”
In Palestine, documentation itself is an act of resistance.
The primary cracks seem
Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, has spent many years making an attempt to rework Palestinian struggling into authorized claims the world can not wave away. He has lived by means of jail, harassment, the destruction of Gaza and exile to Cairo after his house in Gaza was bombed. But his central demand stays modest: “We don’t need Gaza to be the graveyard of worldwide regulation, and we would like the Gazans to have justice and dignity.”
For years, the worldwide response was to delay. Information have been submitted. Experiences have been printed. Proof gathered. Little moved.
That’s the reason the ICC arrest warrants towards Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024 mattered a lot.
They didn’t finish impunity. They didn’t cease the warfare. However they broke one thing that had appeared virtually everlasting: the belief that Israeli leaders would stay eternally past the attain of worldwide legal regulation. After assembly the ICC prosecutor, Sourani mentioned, for Palestinians, the long-protected wall had lastly cracked.
Chantal Meloni, a world legal lawyer who has labored carefully with Palestinian authorized groups, agrees. What they noticed, she says, are “the primary concrete cracks within the wall of a longstanding impunity that had been granted to the state of Israel”.
However the assault on the wall was by no means going to be ignored. And the backlash, when it got here, was directed not solely at Palestinians, however on the establishments and people carrying their instances.
Nobody is aware of that price higher than Fatou Bensouda. As chief prosecutor of the ICC from 2012 to 2021, the Gambian lawyer opened investigations in Afghanistan, Libya, Myanmar and the occupied Palestinian territory. Worldwide justice, she says, rests on a easy promise: that nobody, irrespective of how highly effective, is above the regulation. Palestine examined that promise to destruction. What occurs, she asks, when these accused of violating worldwide regulation are backed by the world’s strongest international locations? What occurs when the courtroom itself comes beneath assault?
For Bensouda, the reply will not be theoretical. As her workplace moved in the direction of the Palestine file, she says, the stress started at her entrance door in The Hague. Two males she didn’t recognise arrived at her house in a rental automotive, requested to see her, and handed her an envelope containing $500, claiming it was a reward from somebody she had as soon as helped. The message, she understood, was not the cash. It was the tackle. “They knew the place I lived.”
She reported the incident to ICC safety and the Dutch authorities. The cellphone numbers the lads left, she says, traced again to Israel. She says she will not be conscious of any critical investigation that adopted.
The stress didn’t cease there. Bensouda describes a assembly in a New York resort, organized on the margins of the UN Common Meeting, during which she got here nose to nose with the then head of the Israeli Mossad, Yossi Cohen. Throughout that assembly and others, she says, the message hardened from appeal to warning: cease the Palestine investigation.
Her account is according to reporting by The Guardian, which detailed a almost decade-long Mossad operation to surveil, stress, and discredit her, together with alleged threats towards her household.
In 2020, after she superior the investigations into Israeli actions in Palestine and US abuses in Afghanistan, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Bensouda personally, the primary time a sitting ICC prosecutor had been focused on this means.
The penalties reached far past journey bans. Her checking account on the UN Federal Credit score Union was frozen. Routine transactions grew to become unattainable. Her mortgage financial institution closed her down. Her son’s account in The Gambia was blocked. Her husband, she says, was photographed and recorded by investigators in search of one thing – something – that could possibly be used towards him.
What stayed together with her, she says, was not solely the intimidation however the silence round it. “I felt left alone. I felt unsupported.” Justice, and people making an attempt to do justice, have been – she felt – being “sacrificed on the altar of political pursuits”.
The sample she described has solely intensified. In February 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an govt order imposing sanctions on the ICC after it issued the warrants towards Netanyahu and Gallant. Sitting prosecutor Karim Khan and several other ICC judges have since been sanctioned. The information companies Reuters and PBS Information reported that the measures have chilled the courtroom’s work, workers have resigned, financial institution accounts have been frozen, and prosecutions slowed. In Could 2026, Khan himself described a “harmful” try by states to take away him after the Netanyahu warrant.
Triestino Mariniello, who represents Gaza victims earlier than the ICC, warns that the courtroom is turning into a “comfortable goal” for highly effective states, the place “people mandated to supply justice are punished whereas the perpetrators of those crimes take pleasure in impunity and proceed to commit these crimes”.
Cuno Tarfusser, a former Italian ICC choose, frames the difficulty in ethical phrases. “Evil wins over the rule of regulation.”
A retaliation ladder
The retaliation doesn’t cease on the courtroom. UN Particular Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has documented what she calls Israel’s deliberate creation of a “torturous surroundings” for Palestinians, was herself sanctioned by the Trump administration in July 2025. Human Rights Watch referred to as it an assault on the UN human rights system itself. In Could 2026, a US federal choose quickly blocked the sanctions, and the Treasury briefly eliminated her from the checklist, just for a federal appeals courtroom to reinstate the designation days later.
Israel has gone additional. In June 2024, after the UN added the Israeli military to its annual checklist of events chargeable for grave violations towards youngsters in armed battle, Israeli officers lashed out at Secretary-Common António Guterres, with the international minister calling the itemizing “shameful”. Israeli media subsequently reported strikes to freeze cooperation with the secretary-general’s workplace after further UN listings associated to conflict-related sexual violence.
It’s a retaliation ladder: From backside to prime, there’s first the Palestinian survivor. Then the fieldworker. Then the NGO. Then the lawyer. Then the UN professional. Then the prosecutor. Then the courtroom itself.
All down that ladder, lawyers and NGOs maintain working. Kifaya Khraim of the Girls’s Centre for Authorized Help and Counselling paperwork sexual violence towards Palestinian girls, abuse designed not solely to injure however to silence.
Leah Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer who has represented Palestinians for greater than 5 many years, names administrative detention for what it’s: an inherited British colonial instrument that permits Palestinians to be held with out cost on secret proof. In London, lawyer Tayab Ali of Bindmans LLP has spent years pursuing common jurisdiction instances, together with a UK arrest warrant towards former Israeli Overseas Minister Tzipi Livni, testing whether or not grave crimes could be prosecuted when home techniques refuse.
However Sourani on the PCHR is aware of the perils of difficult Israeli impunity solely too nicely: In January 2025, his 33-year-old colleague Ihab Marwan Kamal Faisal was killed alongside together with his household in an Israeli air strike.
The info on the bottom maintain shifting
Whereas lawyers wait on courts to behave, the map retains altering. In August 2025, Israeli planning authorities gave closing approval to the long-dormant E1 settlement plan – some 3,400 housing models east of Jerusalem that critics, together with 21 international ministers led by the UK’s David Lammy, warn would sever the northern West Financial institution from the south and bury the territorial foundation of a Palestinian state. By January 2026, development was being pushed forward regardless of worldwide protest. Amnesty Worldwide described the second as one among “world impunity fueling Israel’s illegal annexation measures within the West Financial institution”, and Al-Haq has referred to as it a step towards “unprecedented” de jure annexation.
In Gaza, in the meantime, the Safety Council in November 2025 adopted Decision 2803, endorsing a US-led “Complete Plan to Finish the Gaza Battle”, establishing a Board of Peace and authorising an Worldwide Stabilisation Pressure. Implementation has been gradual and contested, and the decision sits awkwardly alongside the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion on the illegality of Israel’s continued presence within the occupied territory and Safety Council Decision 2334’s reaffirmation that settlements haven’t any authorized validity.
A 64-nation coalition calls for ‘significant penalties’
That is the context during which a uncommon cross-regional diplomatic alignment confronted the Safety Council in early June 2026. In a joint media stakeout, Riyad Mansour, everlasting observer of the State of Palestine to the UN, and Abdulaziz M Alwasil, everlasting consultant of Saudi Arabia, addressed the council on behalf of the State of Palestine, the 22-member Arab Group and the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, backed in a notable shift by seven members of the Safety Council itself, together with China, Russia and 5 European Council members. Collectively, the group represents greater than a third of UN membership.
They warned that regional conflicts are getting used as cowl to entrench irreversible info on the bottom, the E1 plan within the West Financial institution and increasing navy management in Gaza chief amongst them. Citing Decision 2803, Decision 2334 and the ICJ’s latest advisory opinions, the joint briefing demanded rapid worldwide accountability and “significant penalties” for violations, not additional postponement.
For the Palestinian lawyers and human rights defenders whose many years of documentation underpin these resolutions and that advisory opinion, the stakeout was a reminder that their recordsdata at the moment are a part of the diplomatic file, and that with out enforcement, even a 64-nation majority doesn’t by itself bend energy.
What’s on trial
The Palestinian case is not solely about Palestinian struggling, and even Israeli impunity. It’s about whether or not the world nonetheless intends for regulation to be utilized equally. If the regulation applies solely to the weak, it’s not searching for justice. If courts transfer solely when highly effective states permit them to maneuver, they don’t seem to be arbiters of justice. If the individuals who doc torture are punished extra swiftly than the individuals who order it, then what exists will not be a justice system however a efficiency of justice, one which runs solely till the highly effective object.
Bensouda refuses to concede defeat. Requested whether or not the ICC will survive its present siege, she returns to the folks the courtroom was constructed for. “There are individuals who have misplaced full hope in what is going on of their home jurisdictions, and so they look as much as the courtroom as a beacon of hope. We can not allow them to down.”
The testimonies exist. The survivors have spoken. The lawyers have carried the proof so far as they’ll carry it. What stays now will not be solely a trial of Israeli abuses. It’s a world that is aware of of them – and should now resolve whether or not to behave.
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