The case does not begin in The Hague.
It begins in a bombed street in Gaza, where a lawyer kneels to write down a name before the body is buried. It begins with a prison visit, where a detainee cannot yet say what has been done to her body. It begins in a fieldworker’s notebook, a scar photographed, a testimony taken in whispers, a file carried out of a place where everyone knows that evidence itself is dangerous.
Long before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in November 2024 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Palestinian lawyers and human rights organisations had already built the archive of evidence the world is now being asked to confront.
They documented torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, attacks on hospitals, the killing of children and the destruction of entire families. They did this for years while being smeared, raided, surveilled, closed by military order, labelled “terrorists”, threatened, exiled and ignored.
The people trying to make the law speak have had to do so while under attack themselves.
Tahseen Elayyan of Al-Haq describes the process. His organisation, one of the oldest Palestinian human rights groups, gathers testimony directly from victims and witnesses, preserves whatever evidence can be saved, and turns those fragments into reports and legal submissions for courts, including the ICC.
That work, he says, is exactly why Al-Haq is targeted.
“My organisation has been designated as a terrorist organisation [in 2021] because of the work that we do,” he says. “The organisation is closed by a military order, but we are still working from the office.”
The same pattern runs across Palestinian civil society. In 2021, Israel designated six Palestinian rights groups – Al-Haq, Addameer, Defense for Children International-Palestine, Bisan Center, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees – as “terrorist” organisations. In August 2022, Israeli forces raided and sealed their offices in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. UN experts and major rights groups condemned the move as an assault on the people documenting abuses.
Defense for Children International-Palestine had spent years gathering affidavits from children who had been detained, interrogated, beaten and shot. “Instead of opening an investigation into these allegations, the Israeli authorities raided the DCI office,” says Ayed Abu Eqtaish, its accountability director. “Instead of investigating these allegations, there was pressure on the organisation that revealed this information.”
In Palestine, documentation itself is an act of resistance.
Tahseen Elayyan, from Al-Haq, speaks at a joint news conference in Ramallah, on Monday, November 8, 2021, after security researchers said spyware from the Israeli company NSO Group was detected on the cellphones of six Palestinian human rights activists [Nasser Nasser/AP] The first cracks appear
Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, has spent decades trying to transform Palestinian suffering into legal claims the world cannot wave away. He has lived through prison, harassment, the destruction of Gaza and exile to Cairo after his home in Gaza was bombed. Yet his central demand remains modest: “We don’t want Gaza to be the graveyard of international law, and we want the Gazans to have justice and dignity.”
For years, the international response was to delay. Files were submitted. Reports were published. Evidence accumulated. Little moved.
That is why the ICC arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024 mattered so much.
They did not end impunity. They did not stop the war. But they broke something that had seemed almost permanent: the assumption that Israeli leaders would remain forever beyond the reach of international criminal law. After meeting the ICC prosecutor, Sourani said, for Palestinians, the long-protected wall had finally cracked.
Chantal Meloni, an international criminal lawyer who has worked closely with Palestinian legal teams, agrees. What they saw, she says, are “the first concrete cracks in the wall of a longstanding impunity that had been granted to the state of Israel”.
But the assault on the wall was never going to be ignored. And the backlash, when it came, was directed not only at Palestinians, but at the institutions and individuals carrying their cases.
No one knows that cost better 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. International justice, she says, rests on a simple promise: that no one, no matter how powerful, is above the law. Palestine tested that promise to destruction. What happens, she asks, when those accused of violating international law are backed by the world’s most powerful countries? What happens when the court itself comes under attack?…
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