Palestinian human rights defenders, lawyers, and civil society organizations have spent years assembling a legal record of alleged Israeli violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory — and the people building that record have themselves become targets.

The ICC's formal jurisdiction over the situation was established on March 3, 2021, when the then-Prosecutor opened an investigation into the Situation in the State of Palestine. Three years later, on May 20, 2024, Prosecutor Karim Khan filed applications for arrest warrants before Pre-Trial Chamber I — a procedural step that moves the case from investigation into the warrant phase and signals that the Office of the Prosecutor believes the evidentiary threshold for individual criminal responsibility has been met. The filing placed senior Israeli and Hamas figures within the court's charging framework simultaneously, a prosecutorial choice that drew immediate political controversy in Western capitals.

The evidentiary base feeding that investigation is broad. Palestinian lawyer Salah Hammouri submitted documentation to the ICC detailing years of alleged persecution and tactics the submission characterized as forced transfer of Palestinians from occupied territories. Hammouri's submission is one thread in a much larger fabric: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International filed a joint submission to the UN Committee Against Torture in June 2022 addressing Israel's compliance with the Convention against Torture, while Amnesty International has separately reported that Israel continued to commit the crimes of genocide and apartheid and subjected Gaza's population to mass starvation, killings, and displacement.

The UN system has been generating its own parallel record. The UN Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 55/28 on April 5, 2024, addressing the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and affirming the obligation to ensure accountability and justice. A report by the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression examined the Gaza conflict's impact on freedom of expression — a dimension that bears directly on the ability of journalists and monitors to function in the territory. Most recently, in a report published April 13, 2026, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture documented that Palestinian captives held in Israeli custody have been subjected to physical and psychological abuse on an exceptional scale — a finding with direct relevance to ICC charging decisions under the Rome Statute's Article 7 and 8 definitions of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry has also logged individual cases. Its reporting documented the April 18, 2024 arrest of a female Palestinian Israeli professor on charges of alleged incitement to terrorism — part of a broader pattern the Commission has tracked of civil and political rights restrictions applied to Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship.

The Cost of Documentation

The people producing this record are not operating in safety. Front Line Defenders has documented systematic harassment of human rights defenders in the Occupied Palestinian Territory: restrictions on freedom of movement, stigmatization, and abductions. The UN Palestinian Rights Committee heard speakers in December 2021 express concern over Israel's designation of six Palestinian civil society organizations as terrorist entities — a move that, under Israeli law, criminalizes association with those groups and can be used to freeze assets, restrict travel, and prosecute staff. The six groups had been significant sources of documentation submitted to international bodies, including the ICC.

A legal study published through the UN Information System on the Question of Palestine examined the legality of the Israeli occupation itself — a foundational question that the International Court of Justice's 2024 advisory opinion addressed more publicly, but which international lawyers have been working through for decades.

What this accumulation of UN resolutions, NGO submissions, special rapporteur reports, and ICC filings adds up to is a legal architecture built largely outside Israel's cooperation. Israel disputes the ICC's jurisdiction and has not ratified the Rome Statute. That jurisdictional tension has not halted proceedings, but it shapes their practical limits: arrest warrants only function when suspects travel to states that are Rome Statute parties, or when political conditions shift enough to enable enforcement.

The parallel pressure on those documenting abuses — lawyers disbarred, organizations designated, academics arrested — raises a structural question that accountability practitioners know well: when the evidentiary chain itself is under attack, what survives into the courtroom? The ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber will eventually rule on Khan's warrant applications using whatever record has been preserved. The integrity of that record depends, in no small part, on how much of it the people building it were able to protect.