International law is not a court of public opinion. It does not award victory to whichever side generates more sympathy, more coverage, or more political support in a given news cycle. It applies legal standards -- the law of armed conflict, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute, the UN Charter -- to specific facts, and it reaches conclusions that are binding in their legal logic regardless of whether either party to a conflict finds those conclusions convenient. This is what makes international law valuable when it works, and it is what makes the events of the past several years involving Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Hamas one of the most important and most poorly understood case studies in how that law actually operates -- and fails to operate -- in practice.

Two international judicial bodies have issued rulings of major significance during this period. The International Court of Justice -- the UN’s principal judicial organ, which adjudicates disputes between states -- issued an advisory opinion in July 2024 on the legal consequences of Israel’s policies in the occupied Palestinian territory. The International Criminal Court -- which prosecutes individuals, not states, for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide -- issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, and separately sought arrest warrants for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif and political leader Yahya Sinwar, both of whom were subsequently killed by Israeli forces before any warrant could be executed.

This is the central fact that any honest account of this period must hold at the centre: the ICC’s prosecutorial action applied to both parties to the conflict. It did not single out one side. The court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, sought warrants against Israeli leadership for the conduct of the war in Gaza and against Hamas leadership for the attacks of 7 October 2023 in the same announcement, applying the same legal framework -- the Rome Statute’s definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity -- to the conduct of both. Reporting and commentary that addresses only one half of this action, in either direction, does not accurately represent what international law concluded.

The ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion was requested by the UN General Assembly and addressed a specific legal question: the legal consequences arising from Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem. The Court concluded, by a large majority, that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful, that Israel is under an obligation to bring an end to its unlawful presence as rapidly as possible, that Israel has an obligation to cease all new settlement activity and evacuate all settlers from the occupied territory, and that Israel is under an obligation to make reparation for the damage caused by its internationally wrongful acts.

An advisory opinion is, by its legal nature, not binding in the way a judgment in a contentious case between states would be. It carries significant legal and moral authority -- the ICJ’s 1971 advisory opinion on Namibia, for example, contributed materially to the eventual end of South African apartheid administration there -- but it does not, on its own, create an enforcement obligation that any body is required to act on. The General Assembly passed a resolution in September 2024 welcoming the opinion and demanding Israel comply with it within twelve months, by a vote of 124 in favour, 14 against, and 43 abstentions. The resolution, like the opinion underlying it, was not binding on Israel and created no mechanism through which compliance could be compelled.

The ICC operates under a different legal mandate from the ICJ. It prosecutes individuals rather than states, and its jurisdiction over the situation in Palestine derives from Palestine’s accession to the Rome Statute in 2015, which the Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber confirmed extended the Court’s territorial jurisdiction to Gaza and the West Bank including East Jerusalem.

In May 2024, Prosecutor Karim Khan announced applications for arrest warrants against five individuals: Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity including starvation as a method of warfare, intentionally directing attacks against civilians, and extermination or murder, in connection with the conduct of military operations in Gaza; and Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif, and Ismail Haniyeh, for war crimes and crimes against humanity including extermination, murder, taking hostages, rape and other sexual violence, in connection with the attacks of 7 October 2023 and the holding of hostages. The Pre-Trial Chamber issued warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November 2024. The warrant applications for Sinwar and Deif were withdrawn after both men were confirmed killed by Israeli forces during 2024; the warrant application for Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran in July 2024, was similarly rendered moot.

This is the fact that distinguishes the ICC’s action from a one-sided political intervention. The Rome Statute does not ask which party’s cause is more sympathetic. It asks whether specific, individually attributable conduct meets the legal definition of a war crime or crime against humanity. The Prosecutor’s office concluded that the conduct of Israeli leadership in prosecuting the war in Gaza met that threshold, and that the conduct of Hamas leadership on 7 October and in the holding of hostages also met that threshold. Both conclusions rest on the same legal framework. Both sets of warrants -- the ones that were issued and the ones that became moot through the deaths of their subjects -- represent international law’s formal, evidence-based assessment that serious crimes were committed.

The ICC has no police force. It has no power to compel any state to arrest a person subject to one of its warrants. Its enforcement depends entirely on the cooperation of states parties to the Rome Statute, who are obligated under the treaty to arrest and surrender individuals subject to ICC warrants if those individuals enter their territory. This dependence on state cooperation is the single most significant structural limitation on the ICC’s effectiveness, and it operates identically regardless of which party to a conflict a warrant targets.

Netanyahu and Gallant have travelled, since the warrants were issued, to states that are parties to the Rome Statute and that, under the treaty’s terms, would be obligated to arrest them. None has done so. The United States, which is not a party to the Rome Statute and has historically taken the position that the Court has no jurisdiction over the conduct of non-member states or their allies, imposed sanctions on ICC officials in response to the warrants -- an unprecedented action against the Court by a major power, and one that several ICC states parties, including close US allies, publicly criticised as an attack on judicial independence.

The only mechanism that could have converted either the ICJ’s advisory opinion or the ICC’s warrants into binding, enforceable international action is the UN Security Council. The Security Council can refer situations to the ICC, mandate sanctions, authorise enforcement action, and require member states to comply with its resolutions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. It has not done any of these things in relation to either the ICJ opinion or the ICC warrants concerning this conflict.

Multiple Security Council resolutions calling for ceasefires, humanitarian access, and the protection of civilians in Gaza were vetoed by the United States between October 2023 and 2025, on the grounds that the resolutions did not adequately condition a ceasefire on the release of hostages held by Hamas or did not sufficiently affirm Israel’s right to self-defence. Russia and China have, on other Middle East-related resolutions in this period, used or threatened their own vetoes for reasons related to their broader strategic positioning rather than the substantive merits of the texts in question. The veto power held by the Council’s five permanent members has, in this conflict as in Sudan and others this edition has examined, functioned as the single most consistent obstacle to converting international legal findings into binding international action.

The human cost of this conflict, and the period preceding and following the events of October 2023, is not the subject The Meridian seeks to adjudicate in this article -- the casualty figures, the conduct of the war, and the historical and political causes of the conflict are the subject of extensive reporting elsewhere, and a single article in a human rights edition cannot and should not attempt to resolve disputes that occupy entire fields of scholarship and diplomacy. What this article addresses is narrower and, The Meridian believes, less contested: the architecture of international law that was supposed to provide accountability for serious violations on every side of this conflict, and what happened when that architecture was actually tested.

The families of the approximately 1,200 people killed in Israel on 7 October 2023, and the families of the more than 250 people taken hostage, are entitled under international law to a legal process that holds the individuals responsible for those acts accountable. The ICC’s warrant applications against Sinwar, Deif, and Haniyeh were a formal recognition of that entitlement. None of those individuals will now face a courtroom. The civilian population of Gaza, whose casualties from the subsequent military campaign have been documented extensively by international and Israeli sources using differing methodologies, are entitled under international law to a legal process that holds those responsible for any unlawful conduct of that campaign accountable. The ICC’s warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant were a formal recognition of that entitlement. Neither man has been arrested, and neither is likely to be while heads of state and senior officials in dozens of countries continue to receive them in official visits.

This edition has examined, across multiple articles, the structural gap between the rights the UDHR guarantees and the enforcement mechanisms available to deliver them. The Palestine-Israel case is, in this respect, not an exception to the pattern this edition has documented elsewhere in Sudan, in Mauritius, in Nigeria, in the Sahel. It is, in fact, one of the clearest illustrations of it -- precisely because the international legal findings in this case are unusually well-documented, unusually evenly applied across the parties involved, and unusually thoroughly ignored in terms of binding enforcement.

The Security Council veto that has blocked binding action on Gaza is the same structural mechanism that has blocked binding action on Sudan. The absence of any enforcement mechanism for ICC warrants against powerful state leadership is the same limitation that has, for two decades, prevented the arrest of Omar al-Bashir despite outstanding warrants related to Darfur. The unwillingness of host states to surrender Hamas leadership to international jurisdiction is structurally identical to the unwillingness of host states to surrender any non-state armed actor whose continued operation serves their strategic interests. None of these limitations is specific to this conflict. All of them are illustrated by it with unusual clarity, because international law spoke unusually clearly here, on both sides, and was unusually thoroughly ignored on both sides as a result.