World on Trial: Lawyers Who Document Israeli Abuses Pay the Price

The case did not begin at The Hague. It began on a bombed street in Gaza, where a lawyer knelt to record a name before a body was buried. It began in a prison visit, where a detainee could not yet say what had been done to his body. It began in a fieldworker's notebook, a photographed scar, a testimony collected in whispers, a file carried out of a place where everyone knew the evidence itself was dangerous.

Long before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Palestinian lawyers and human rights organizations were building the archive of evidence the world was being asked to face. 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, shut down by military order, branded 'terrorist', threatened, exiled, and ignored.

Those trying to make the law speak have had to do so while under attack themselves.

Tahseen Elayyan of Al-Haq described the process: his organization, one of the oldest Palestinian human rights groups, collects direct testimonies from victims and witnesses, preserves whatever evidence can be saved, and turns those fragments into reports and legal submissions to courts, including the ICC. He said: 'My organization was designated as a terrorist organization in 2021 because of the work we do. It was shut down by military order, but we still work from the office.'

The same pattern played out across Palestinian civil society. In 2021, Israel designated six Palestinian human rights groups as 'terrorist' organizations. In August 2022, Israeli forces raided and sealed their offices in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. United Nations experts and major human rights groups condemned the move as an attack on those documenting abuse. Defense for Children International-Palestine has spent years collecting sworn statements from children who were detained, interrogated, beaten, and shot. Ayed Abu Eqtaish, the organization's accountability program director, said: 'Instead of opening an investigation into these allegations, the Israeli authorities raided the DCI office. Instead of investigation, there is pressure on the organization that revealed this information.' In Palestine, documenting evidence is itself an act of resistance.

Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), has spent decades turning Palestinian suffering into legal submissions the world cannot dismiss. He has endured prison, harassment, the destruction of Gaza, and exile to Cairo after his Gaza home was bombed. His central demand remains modest: 'We do not want Gaza to be the graveyard of international law, and we want Gazans to have justice and dignity.'

For years, the international response was delay. Files were filed. Reports were published. Evidence accumulated. Very 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 what had seemed permanent: the assumption that Israeli leaders would forever remain beyond the reach of international criminal law. After the meeting with the ICC prosecutor, Sourani said, for Palestinians the long-defended wall finally cracked.

Chantal Meloni, an international criminal lawyer who works closely with Palestinian legal teams, agreed: 'The first concrete cracks in the long-standing wall of impunity for the state of Israel.' But the assault on the wall has never gone unanswered. The backlash has targeted not only Palestinians, but the organizations and individuals carrying their case.

No one knows that price better than Fatou Bensouda. As ICC chief prosecutor from 2012 to 2021, the Gambian lawyer opened investigations into Afghanistan, Libya, Myanmar, and the occupied Palestinian territory. International justice rests on a simple promise: no one, no matter how powerful, stands above the law. Palestine tested that promise to its limit. She asked: What happens when those accused of violating international law are backed by the world's most powerful states? What happens when the court itself is attacked?

For Bensouda, the answer was not theoretical. As her office moved toward the Palestine file, the pressure began at her own doorstep in The Hague. Two strange men arrived at her home in a rental car, asked to see her, and handed over an envelope containing $500, calling it a gift from someone she had helped. The message was not the money, but the address. 'They knew where I lived.' She reported the incident to ICC security and Dutch authorities. The phone number the men left, she said, traced back to Israel. She said she does not know of any serious investigation that followed.

The pressure did not stop. Bensouda described a meeting in a New York hotel, arranged on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where she was confronted by former Mossad director Yossi Cohen. Through that and other meetings, the message hardened from charm to warning: stop the Palestine investigation. Her account aligns with a Guardian report detailing a nearly decade-long Mossad campaign to surveil, pressure, and smear her, including threats targeting her family.

In 2020, after she proceeded with investigations into Israeli actions in Palestine and U.S. abuses in Afghanistan, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Bensouda personally, the first time a sitting ICC prosecutor was targeted in this way. The penalties went far beyond travel bans. Her bank accounts at the United Nations Federal Credit Union were frozen. Ordinary transactions became impossible. Her mortgage bank closed her accounts. Her son's account in Gambia was blocked. Her husband was photographed and recorded by investigators looking for anything that could be used against him. What stayed with her was not just the intimidation but the silence around it. 'I felt abandoned. I felt unsupported.' Justice and those trying to enforce it had been 'sacrificed on the altar of political interests'.

The pattern she described has only intensified. In February 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing sanctions on the ICC after the court issued warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. The sitting prosecutor, Karim Khan, and several ICC judges were sanctioned. Reuters and PBS News reported the measures paralyzed the court's work, with staff resigning, bank accounts frozen, and prosecutions slowing down. In May 2026, Khan described 'dangerous' efforts by states to remove him following the Netanyahu warrant. Triestino Mariniello, representing Gaza victims before the ICC, warned the court was becoming a 'soft target' for powerful states, where 'individuals tasked with enforcing justice are punished while perpetrators of crimes enjoy impunity and continue committing offenses.' Cuno Tartusser, a former Italian ICC judge, framed the issue in moral terms: 'Evil wins over the rule of law.'

Retaliation has not stopped at the courtroom. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who documented Israel's deliberate creation of a 'torture environment' for Palestinians, was sanctioned by the Trump administration in July 2025. Human Rights Watch called it an attack on the UN human rights system. In May 2026, a U.S. federal judge temporarily blocked the sanctions, and the Treasury temporarily removed her from the list, only for a federal appeals court to reimpose them days later. Israel has gone further. In June 2024, after the UN added the Israeli military to a list of parties responsible for grave violations against children in armed conflict, Israeli officials criticized Secretary-General António Guterres, with the foreign minister calling the listing 'shameful'. Israeli media later reported moves to freeze cooperation with the secretary-general's office following additional listings related to conflict-related sexual violence.

It is a ladder of retaliation: from the bottom up, first the Palestinian victims. Then the fieldworkers. Then the NGOs. Then the lawyers. Then the UN experts. Then the prosecutors. Then the court itself. At every rung of that ladder, lawyers and NGOs continue to work. Kifaya Khraim of the Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling documents sexual violence against Palestinian women, abuse designed not only to hurt but to silence. Leah Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer who has represented Palestinians for more than five decades, calls administrative detention a colonial tool inherited from Britain 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 for former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, testing whether serious crimes can be prosecuted when domestic systems refuse.

But Sourani at PCHR knows the risk of challenging Israel's impunity: In January 2025, his 33-year-old colleague, Ihab Marwan Kamal Faisal, was killed along with his family in an Israeli airstrike.

As lawyers wait for the courts to act, the map continues to change. In August 2025, Israeli planning authorities gave final approval for the E1 settlement plan — roughly 3,400 homes east of Jerusalem that critics, including 21 foreign ministers led by Britain's David Lammy, warned would sever the northern West Bank from the south and bury the territorial basis for a Palestinian state. By January 2026, construction was being accelerated despite international opposition. Amnesty International described the moment as 'global impunity fueling Israel's illegal annexation measures in the West Bank', and Al-Haq called it an 'unprecedented' step toward de jure annexation.

In Gaza, the Security Council in November 2025 adopted Resolution 2803, endorsing a U.S.-led 'Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict', establishing a Peace Council and authorizing an International Stabilization Force. Implementation has been slow and contested, and the resolution sits awkwardly alongside the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion on the illegality of Israel's continued presence in the occupied territory and Security Council Resolution 2334 reaffirming that settlements have no legal validity.

This is the backdrop for a rare diplomatic alignment that confronted the Security Council in early June 2026. In a joint press briefing, 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 Organization of Islamic Cooperation, backed by seven Security Council members including China, Russia, and five European Council members. Together, the grouping represented more than one-third of UN member states. They warned that regional conflict was being used as a cover to consolidate irreversible facts on the ground, notably the E1 plan in the West Bank and the expansion of military control in Gaza. Citing Resolution 2803, Resolution 2334, and recent ICJ advisory opinions, the joint briefing demanded immediate international accountability and 'meaningful consequences' for violations, with no further delay.

For the Palestinian lawyers and human rights defenders whose decades of documentation underpin those resolutions and advisory opinions, the briefing was a reminder that their records are already part of the diplomatic record, and that without enforcement, even a majority of 64 states does not by itself bend power.

The Palestine case is no longer just about Palestinian suffering, or Israeli impunity. It is about whether the world still intends to apply the law equally. If the law only applies to the weak, it does not seek justice. If courts only act when powerful states allow, they are not arbiters of justice. If those who document torture are punished faster than those who order it, then what exists is not a judicial system but a performance of justice, running only until the powerful object. Bensouda refuses to concede defeat. When asked whether the ICC will survive its current siege, she returned to those for whom the court was built: 'There are people who have lost all hope in what is happening in their national justice systems, and they look up to the court as a beacon of hope. We cannot let them down.'

The testimony exists. The survivors have spoken. The lawyers have carried the evidence as far as it can go. What remains now is not just the trial of Israel's abuses. It is a world that knows about them — and must decide whether to act.