A world on trial: How lawyers documenting Israeli abuse pay a price

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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.

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?

For Bensouda, the answer is not theoretical. As her office moved towards the Palestine file, she says, the pressure began at her front door in The Hague. Two men she did not recognise arrived at her home in a rental car, asked to see her, and handed her an envelope containing $500, claiming it was a gift from someone she had once helped. The message, she understood, was not the money. It was the address. “They knew where I lived.”

She reported the incident to ICC security and the Dutch authorities. The phone numbers the men left, she says, traced back to Israel. She says she is not aware of any serious investigation that followed.

The pressure did not stop there. Bensouda describes a meeting in a New York hotel, arranged on the margins of the UN General Assembly, in which she came face to face with the then head of the Israeli Mossad, Yossi Cohen. Across that meeting and others, she says, the message hardened from charm to warning: stop the Palestine investigation.

Her account is consistent with reporting by The Guardian, which detailed a nearly decade-long Mossad operation to surveil, pressure, and discredit her, including alleged threats against her family.

In 2020, after she advanced the investigations into Israeli actions in Palestine and US abuses in Afghanistan, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Bensouda personally, the first time a sitting ICC prosecutor had been targeted in this way.

The penalties reached far beyond travel bans. Her bank account at the UN Federal Credit Union was frozen. Routine transactions became impossible. Her mortgage bank closed her down. Her son’s account in The Gambia was blocked. Her husband, she says, was photographed and recorded by investigators looking for something – anything – that could be used against him.

What stayed with her, she says, was not only the intimidation but the silence around it. “I felt left alone. I felt unsupported.” Justice, and those trying to do justice, were – she felt – being “sacrificed at the altar of political interests”.

The pattern she described has only intensified. In February 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC after it issued the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant. Sitting prosecutor Karim Khan and several ICC judges have since been sanctioned. The news agencies Reuters and PBS News reported that the measures have chilled the court’s work, staff have resigned, bank accounts have been frozen, and prosecutions slowed. In May 2026, Khan himself described a “dangerous” attempt by states to remove him after the Netanyahu warrant.

Triestino Mariniello, who represents Gaza victims before the ICC, warns that the court is becoming a “soft target” for powerful states, where “individuals mandated to provide justice are punished while the perpetrators of these crimes enjoy impunity and continue to commit these crimes”.

Cuno Tarfusser, a former Italian ICC judge, frames the issue in moral terms. “Evil wins over the rule of law.”

A retaliation ladder

The retaliation does not stop at the courtroom. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has documented what she calls Israel’s deliberate creation of a “torturous environment” for Palestinians, was herself sanctioned by the Trump administration in July 2025. Human Rights Watch called it an attack on the UN human rights system itself. In May 2026, a US federal judge temporarily blocked the sanctions, and the Treasury briefly removed her from the list, only for a federal appeals court to reinstate the designation days later.

Israel has gone further. In June 2024, after the UN added the Israeli army to its annual list of parties responsible for grave violations against children in armed conflict, Israeli officials lashed out at Secretary-General António Guterres, with the foreign minister calling the listing “shameful”. Israeli media subsequently reported moves to freeze cooperation with the secretary-general’s office after additional UN listings related to conflict-related sexual violence.

It’s a retaliation ladder: From bottom to top, there’s first the Palestinian survivor. Then the fieldworker. Then the NGO. Then the lawyer. Then the UN expert. Then the prosecutor. Then the court itself.

All down that ladder, lawyers and NGOs keep working. Kifaya Khraim of the Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling documents sexual violence against Palestinian women, abuse designed not only to injure but to silence.

Leah Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer who has represented Palestinians for more than five decades, names administrative detention for what it is: an inherited British colonial tool that allows Palestinians to be held without charge on secret evidence. In London, lawyer Tayab Ali of Bindmans LLP has spent years pursuing universal jurisdiction cases, including a UK arrest warrant against former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, testing whether grave crimes can be prosecuted when domestic systems refuse.

But Sourani at the PCHR knows the perils of challenging Israeli impunity only too well: In January 2025, his 33-year-old colleague Ihab Marwan Kamal Faisal was killed along with his family in an Israeli air strike.

The facts on the ground keep shifting

While lawyers wait on courts to act, the map keeps changing. In August 2025, Israeli planning authorities gave final approval to the long-dormant E1 settlement plan – some 3,400 housing units east of Jerusalem that critics, including 21 foreign ministers led by the UK’s David Lammy, warn would sever the northern West Bank from the south and bury the territorial basis of a Palestinian state. By January 2026, construction was being pushed ahead despite international protest. Amnesty International described the moment as one of “global impunity fueling Israel’s unlawful annexation measures in the West Bank”, and Al-Haq has called it a step toward “unprecedented” de jure annexation.

In Gaza, meanwhile, the Security Council in November 2025 adopted Resolution 2803, endorsing a US-led “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict”, establishing a Board of Peace and authorising an International Stabilisation Force. Implementation has been slow and contested, and the resolution sits awkwardly alongside the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion on the illegality of Israel’s continued presence in the occupied territory and Security Council Resolution 2334’s reaffirmation that settlements have no legal validity.

A 64-nation coalition demands ‘meaningful consequences’

This is the context in which a rare cross-regional diplomatic alignment confronted the Security Council in early June 2026. In a joint media stakeout, Riyad Mansour, permanent observer of the State of Palestine to the UN, and Abdulaziz M Alwasil, permanent representative 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 Security Council itself, including China, Russia and five European Council members. Together, the group represents more than a third of UN membership.

They warned that regional conflicts are being used as cover to entrench irreversible facts on the ground, the E1 plan in the West Bank and expanding military control in Gaza chief among them. Citing Resolution 2803, Resolution 2334 and the ICJ’s recent advisory opinions, the joint briefing demanded immediate international accountability and “meaningful consequences” for violations, not further postponement.

For the Palestinian lawyers and human rights defenders whose decades of documentation underpin those resolutions and that advisory opinion, the stakeout was a reminder that their files are now part of the diplomatic record, and that without enforcement, even a 64-nation majority does not by itself bend power.

What is on trial

The Palestinian case is no longer only about Palestinian suffering, or even Israeli impunity. It is about whether the world still intends for law to be applied equally. If the law applies only to the weak, it is not seeking justice. If courts move only when powerful states allow them to move, they are not arbiters of justice. If the people who document torture are punished more swiftly than the people who order it, then what exists is not a justice system but a performance of justice, one that runs only until the powerful object.

Bensouda refuses to concede defeat. Asked whether the ICC will survive its current siege, she returns to the people the court was built for. “There are people who have lost complete hope in what is happening in their domestic jurisdictions, and they look up to the court as a beacon of hope. We cannot let them down.”

The testimonies exist. The survivors have spoken. The lawyers have carried the evidence as far as they can carry it. What remains now is not only a trial of Israeli abuses. It is a world that knows of them – and must now decide whether to act.

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