One thread, every collection
Law & Accountability
UN resolutions, courts, legal terms, the ICJ and ICC record.
84 entries across 9 collections
ICC Arrest Warrants
2024
On 21 November 2024 the International Criminal Court rejected Israel's challenges to its jurisdiction and issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and for the Hamas commander Mohammed Deif.
The 1978 Invasion of South Lebanon
1978
Israel sends 25,000 troops into south Lebanon against the PLO. Up to a quarter of a million Lebanese are displaced; the Security Council answers with Resolution 425 and creates UNIFIL.
The BDS Call
2005
Over 170 Palestinian unions, refugee networks, and civil society organizations call on the world to impose boycotts, divestment, and sanctions on Israel until it complies with international law.
The ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Occupation
2024
On 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice found Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful and held that it must be brought to an end as rapidly as possible, settlements evacuated and reparation made. The General Assembly demanded compliance within twelve months.
The ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Wall
2004
On 9 July 2004 the International Court of Justice found that the wall Israel was building inside the occupied West Bank was contrary to international law, that Israel must stop building it, dismantle what stood and make reparation — and that other states must not recognise the situation it created.
The ICJ Genocide Case
2024
The International Court of Justice orders provisional measures in South Africa's genocide case against Israel over Gaza, finding the rights claimed plausible.
The Mandate for Palestine
1922
The League of Nations approved the Mandate on 24 July 1922. Its preamble wrote the Balfour Declaration into international law, and its articles obliged Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and settlement — while referring to the Arab majority only as 'the existing non-Jewish communities.'
The October War and Resolution 338
1973
Egypt and Syria attacked on 6 October 1973 to break the diplomatic deadlock over the occupied territories. The war ended with Security Council resolution 338, which ordered a ceasefire and, for the first time, negotiations 'between the parties concerned' to implement resolution 242.
The Palestinian Declaration of Independence
1988
Meeting in Algiers, the Palestine National Council proclaims the State of Palestine and accepts UN Resolutions 242 and 338 — a de facto two-state formula.
UN General Assembly Resolution 194
1948
Adopted on 11 December 1948, resolution 194 (III) established the Conciliation Commission for Palestine and, in paragraph 11, resolved that refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, with compensation for those choosing not to return.
UN Security Council Resolution 242
1967
Adopted unanimously on 22 November 1967, resolution 242 emphasised the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and called for withdrawal from territories occupied in the recent conflict. It mentioned Palestinians only once, as a refugee problem.
Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni
Commander of the Army of the Holy War, killed at al-Qastal in April 1948 · 1908–1948
The most prominent Palestinian field commander of his generation, who fought in the 1936–39 rebellion, rebuilt the Army of the Holy War after the partition resolution, and was killed retaking al-Qastal on 8 April 1948.
Diana Buttu
Lawyer and political analyst
Palestinian-Canadian lawyer who advised the PLO's negotiating team from 2000 to 2005 and has since become one of the sharpest analysts of the failed negotiations process.
Fayez Sayegh
Intellectual, diplomat, and UN delegate · 1922–1980
Palestinian philosopher and diplomat who founded the PLO's Palestine Research Center, produced the first systematic analysis of Zionism as settler colonialism, and was a principal architect of the UN's 1975 resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism.
Marwan Barghouti
General secretary of Fatah in the West Bank, imprisoned in Israel since 2002 · 1959–
The Fatah leader from Kobar, imprisoned since 2002 under five life sentences after an Inter-Parliamentary Union-appointed observer concluded that breaches of international law made a fair trial impossible and that guilt had not been established — an observer's conclusion, not a court acquittal.
Noura Erakat
Human rights attorney and legal scholar · 1980–
Palestinian-American human rights attorney and Rutgers professor whose book Justice for Some examines how international law has shaped — and so often failed — the Palestinian struggle.
Desmond Tutu: Israeli Apartheid is Worse Than South Africa's
Desmond Tutu
I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces.
Francesca Albanese: 'Anatomy of a Genocide' and the Reports of the UN Special Rapporteur
Francesca Albanese
There are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating that Israel has committed genocide has been met.
Nelson Mandela on Palestine
Nelson Mandela
We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.
South Africa v. Israel: The Genocide Case at the International Court of Justice
Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC
The first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something.
Ta-Nehisi Coates on Palestine and 'The Message'
Ta-Nehisi Coates
It occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet — under American patronage — that resembled the world that my parents were born into.
The Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS
Palestinian civil society organizations
These non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law.
Absentees' Property Law (1950)
legal
An Israeli law that vested the homes, land, and assets of Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war in a state Custodian, becoming the main legal instrument by which Israel took possession of Palestinian refugee property.
Administrative Detention
legal
Imprisonment without charge or trial, ordered by military commanders on the basis of secret evidence and renewable in six-month increments without limit; Israel uses it extensively against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Apartheid
legal
Apartheid is a crime against humanity defined in the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute as inhumane acts committed within an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another. Since 2021, leading Israeli and international human rights organizations have concluded that Israel's rule over Palestinians meets this definition.
Area A, Area B, and Area C
legal
The three zones into which the 1995 Oslo II Interim Agreement divided the occupied West Bank: Area A under Palestinian civil and security control, Area B under Palestinian civil and Israeli security control, and Area C — about 60 percent of the territory — under full Israeli control.
Ban on Family Unification
legal
Israel's 2003 Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order), which bars Palestinians from the occupied territory who marry Israeli citizens or residents from obtaining legal status in Israel, forcing thousands of families to live apart or abroad.
Centre of Life
legal
The test Israel's Interior Ministry applies to Palestinians of East Jerusalem, who hold permanent residency rather than citizenship: prove the city is the centre of your life, or lose your status in it. It is the mechanism behind the family story that ends 'they went abroad to study, and were not let back'.
Custodian of Absentee Property
legal
The Israeli office in which the property of Palestinian refugees vests under the Absentees' Property Law — an administrator rather than a decree, empowered to certify a person absent, to hold everything they owned, and to sell it on to a state Development Authority.
Dahiya Doctrine
legal
An Israeli military doctrine, named for the Beirut suburb largely destroyed in the 2006 Lebanon war, under which force disproportionate to the threat is applied to the civilian areas from which attacks originate, on the premise that such areas are to be treated as military targets. It was stated publicly by Major General Gadi Eisenkot in October 2008 and recorded by the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict in 2009.
First Registration
legal
The single narrow route by which a Palestinian may still enter unregistered West Bank land in the tabu after Military Order 291 closed settlement of title — privately funded, parcel by parcel, with the evidentiary burden and the whole cost on the applicant.
Gaza Blockade
legal
The Gaza blockade is the closure regime imposed by Israel — with Egypt controlling the Rafah crossing — on the Gaza Strip since June 2007, severely restricting the movement of people and goods by land, air, and sea for a population of more than two million.
Genocide
legal
A crime defined in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as any of five enumerated acts 'committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.' The definition turns on intent and on the enumerated acts, not on scale or on method; Article III makes conspiracy, direct and public incitement, attempt and complicity separately punishable.
Hafrada
legal
Hebrew for 'separation' — the word used in Israeli political discourse for the policy of physically and legally separating Israelis from Palestinians in the occupied territory, and taken up in human-rights analyses of the barrier, the permit regime, segregated road networks and the closure system.
Incitement
legal
In international criminal law, direct and public incitement to commit genocide is a completed crime in its own right under Article III(c) of the 1948 Genocide Convention, punishable whether or not genocide follows. In the Israeli-Palestinian context the word is also used politically — as an accusation levelled at Palestinian speech and school curricula — and the two usages should not be confused: one is a legal category with a defined threshold, the other a term of advocacy.
Infiltrator
legal
Mistanen — the Hebrew legal and military term applied from 1948 onward to Palestinians who crossed back toward the villages and towns they had been displaced from. The word converted a refugee's attempt to go home into a security offence, and the policy built on it was the practical bar to return in the years the question might still have been settled.
Military Order 101
legal
An August 1967 Israeli military order that bans political gatherings, processions, and publications — including the display of flags and political symbols — in the occupied West Bank without prior permission from the military commander.
Military Order 291 (1968)
legal
The order by which the Israeli military commander in the West Bank halted settlement of land title in December 1968, stopping the registration process mid-stream and leaving roughly two thirds of the territory permanently unregistered — the precondition for declaring that land 'state land'.
Nation-State Law (2018)
legal
Basic Law: Israel — the Nation State of the Jewish People, adopted by the Knesset on 19 July 2018. A constitutional-rank law providing that 'the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People,' designating 'the development of Jewish settlement' as a national value the state must promote, and downgrading Arabic from an official language to one with 'a special status.' It contains no equality clause.
Other Registered Persons (UNRWA)
legal
The second of UNRWA's two registration categories: people the agency serves who do not meet all of its Palestine Refugee criteria and are therefore not counted in the official registered refugee figure — a bookkeeping line that is routinely misread as a statement about who is or is not a refugee.
Present Absentee
legal
Israeli administrative usage — nifkadim nokhahim — for a Palestinian who never left the country and holds Israeli citizenship, but whose land and home were classified as 'absentee property' and taken anyway: present in the state, legally absent from their own field.
Punitive Demolition
legal
The Israeli practice of demolishing the family home of a Palestinian accused of an attack — a penalty imposed on relatives who are not suspected of any offence, carried out under a British Mandate emergency regulation and applied only to Palestinians.
Right of Return
legal
The right of return is the principle that Palestinians displaced in 1948, and their descendants, are entitled to return to their homes — affirmed for the 1948 refugees by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948 and reaffirmed by the Assembly nearly every year since.
Settlement
legal
Settlements are the residential communities Israel has built for its citizens in the territories occupied in 1967. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory, and the UN Security Council has affirmed that the settlements have 'no legal validity.'
Tabu
legal
The land registry — from the Ottoman Turkish tapu, a title deed. The book in which ownership of a parcel is written down, carried from the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 through the British Mandate and Jordanian rule into the present. Most land in the West Bank has never been entered in it, and that absence is the hinge on which almost every modern land dispute turns.
Wikala Dawriyya
legal
The irrevocable power of attorney through which land in the West Bank was commonly sold under occupation, when registering a transfer at the tabu meant an intolerable wait. It made a piece of paper, rather than the register, the thing that moved land — and it is the instrument at the centre of the fraud cases.
Arabs have 22 countries; Palestinians can just go live in one of them
rhetoric
Self-determination is the right of each people in its own country, not an interchangeable commodity by language group — the UN recognized the Palestinian people's inalienable rights, including return to their homes, in Resolution 3236 (XXIX) of 1974, and no state would accept the same argument for itself.
Calling Israel an apartheid state is a slander with no basis in law
legal
Apartheid is a defined crime, not an epithet. The Rome Statute, Article 7(2)(h), defines 'the crime of apartheid' as 'inhumane acts... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.' Israel's own B'Tselem (January 2021), Human Rights Watch (April 2021) and Amnesty International (February 2022) each concluded that the definition is met, and on 19 July 2024 the International Court of Justice held that Israel's legislation and measures in the West Bank and East Jerusalem 'constitute a breach of Article 3 of CERD,' the article that condemns racial segregation and apartheid.
Civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas, which uses human shields
legal
Using human shields is a war crime under IHL, but it does not suspend the attacker's own duties of distinction, proportionality and precaution — and the UN's 2009 Gaza fact-finding mission, while documenting that Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians as shields, found no evidence that Palestinian armed groups forced civilians to shield their operations.
Criticism of Israel or Zionism is antisemitism
rhetoric
Antisemitism — hatred of Jews as Jews — is real and must be fought, but the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Stern, himself warns it was never meant to police political speech, and the Jerusalem Declaration, signed by hundreds of scholars of Jewish and Holocaust studies, states that evidence-based criticism of Israel, including comparisons to settler-colonialism or apartheid, is not in itself antisemitic.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, with equal rights for all citizens
legal
Palestinian citizens of Israel do vote, but the state's own laws document a different structure: automatic immigration rights for Jews only (Law of Return, 1950), confiscation of refugee property (Absentees' Property Law, 1950), a 2018 Basic Law reserving national self-determination 'unique to the Jewish people,' and over 65 laws Adalah classifies as discriminatory.
Israel left Gaza in 2005, so Gaza is no longer occupied
legal
Occupation is a question of effective control, not troop locations: after 2005 Israel kept control of Gaza's borders, airspace, territorial waters, population registry and economy, which is why the UN Security Council (Res. 1860, 2009), the ICRC, Human Rights Watch and the ICJ continued to treat Gaza as occupied.
Israel's laws treat all citizens equally; the 2018 Nation-State Law was purely symbolic
legal
The Knesset's own English text of Basic Law: Israel — the Nation State of the Jewish People (2018) states at clause 1(c) that 'the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People,' at clause 7 that 'the State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation,' and at clause 4 that Hebrew is 'the language of the State' while Arabic has only 'a special status.' It is a Basic Law — constitutional rank — and it contains no equality clause. Adalah's database lists more than 65 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens and residents.
The Arabs rejected the UN partition plan in 1947, so they forfeited their rights
history
Resolution 181 (II) awarded 56% of Palestine to a Jewish community that was 32% of the population and owned about 6% of the land, and the proposed Jewish state would itself have held nearly as many Arabs as Jews — rejection by the two-thirds majority was the predictable democratic response, and a General Assembly recommendation cannot extinguish a people's rights.
The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity — they always reject peace
history
The Palestine National Council accepted Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and declared Palestinian statehood on 15 November 1988, an offer to settle on 22 per cent of historic Palestine; the Arab Peace Initiative of 28 March 2002 offered Israel, from every Arab state, an end to the conflict and 'normal relations' in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 lines, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a 'just and agreed solution to the Palestine refugee problem in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 (III).' Both stood unanswered. Meanwhile the settler population Israel maintains in the occupied territory reached about 465,000 in the West Bank and 230,000 in East Jerusalem by 2023.
The refugees could have gone home after the war; nobody stopped them
history
Return was blocked by decision and by demolition. Major General Avraham Tamir described the policy in a recorded interview later sealed by Israel's Defence Ministry: 'Ben-Gurion lays down as policy that we have to demolish [the villages] so they won't have anywhere to return to... within 48 hours I knocked all those villages to the ground. Period. There's no place to return to.' The Absentees' Property Law of 1950 then vested the refugees' land, homes and bank accounts in a state Custodian, and UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948, which resolved that refugees wishing to return 'should be permitted to do so,' has never been implemented.
There is no Palestinian right of return
legal
UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) of 11 December 1948 resolved that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace 'should be permitted to do so,' and the right to return to one's own country is also codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 13(2)) and the binding ICCPR (Art. 12(4)).
Zionism is simply Jewish self-determination, and opposing it is denying Jews what every nation has
morality
Self-determination is universal, but it is not a license to extinguish another people's rights: in 1975 the UN General Assembly determined that Zionism, as practiced, was 'a form of racism and racial discrimination' (Res. 3379) — a resolution repealed in 1991 as Israel's condition for attending the Madrid Conference, not because the underlying question had been resolved.
Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel
Adalah
Founded in 1996 and based in Haifa, Adalah litigates and advocates for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and for Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, before Israeli courts and international bodies.
Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
Addameer
Addameer supports Palestinian political prisoners held by Israeli authorities and campaigns against administrative detention and torture.
Al-Haq — Defending Human Rights in Palestine
Al-Haq
Al-Haq is a Palestinian non-governmental human rights organization based in Ramallah, specializing in legal research, advocacy, and international accountability.
Amnesty International — Israel and Occupied Palestinian Territories
Amnesty International
Amnesty documents human rights violations by Israeli authorities and Palestinian armed groups and campaigns for justice, accountability, and an end to apartheid.
Anatomy of a Genocide — report of the Special Rapporteur (A/HRC/55/73)
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
The Special Rapporteur's report to the Human Rights Council's 55th session concluding that there are reasonable grounds to believe the threshold indicating the commission of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met.
Application Instituting Proceedings — South Africa v. Israel (Genocide Convention, Gaza)
ICJ
South Africa's 84-page application of 29 December 2023 instituting proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention, together with a request for provisional measures.
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
BADIL
Founded in 1998 in Bethlehem, BADIL defends the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons, with a legal focus on residency, return, property restitution, and the right of return under international law.
Community Action Center — Al-Quds University, Jerusalem
Community Action Center (CAC), Al-Quds University
A Palestinian rights centre in the Old City of Jerusalem, created by Al-Quds University in 1999, with a legal services unit and open advice hours on residency, national insurance, and building and demolition files.
Critical observations on the Amnesty International genocide report — Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany
Just Security
The December 2024 analysis by two Israeli international lawyers disputing Amnesty International's genocide determination on evidentiary grounds — the principal scholarly counter-argument, recorded here so the disagreement can be read in its own words.
Defense for Children International — Palestine (DCIP)
DCIP
DCIP documents the detention, killing, and maiming of Palestinian children by Israeli forces and advocates for their rights under international law.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor — Geneva-based documentation of violations in Gaza
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
A youth-led nonprofit founded in 2011 and registered in Switzerland, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor documents human rights violations across Europe and the MENA region, with extensive field reporting from the Gaza Strip.
HaMoked — Center for the Defence of the Individual
HaMoked
A Jerusalem legal-aid organisation that takes individual Palestinian cases against the Israeli authorities — residency revocation, family unification, tracing detainees, house demolition, freedom of movement — and publishes the ministry data it extracts along the way.
Human Rights Watch — Israel and Palestine
Human Rights Watch
HRW investigates and reports on human rights conditions in Israel and Palestine, including laws and policies affecting Palestinians under occupation and in Israel.
ICC Arrest Warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant — Pre-Trial Chamber I, 21 November 2024
ICC
ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I's decisions of 21 November 2024 rejecting Israel's jurisdictional challenges and issuing arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
ICC Situation in the State of Palestine — International Criminal Court
International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court has been investigating alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Situation in the State of Palestine since 2021; in November 2024 its Pre-Trial Chamber issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.
ICJ Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024 — Legal Consequences of Israel's Policies and Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
ICJ
The International Court of Justice's advisory opinion holding Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful, and obliging it to end that presence as rapidly as possible, evacuate all settlers, and make reparation.
ICJ Order of 26 January 2024 — Provisional Measures, South Africa v. Israel
ICJ
The International Court of Justice's first provisional measures order in the Genocide Convention case, finding South Africa's rights under the Convention plausible and ordering six measures, including the prevention of genocidal acts and the punishment of incitement.
ICJ Orders of 28 March and 24 May 2024 — Additional Measures and the Rafah Order
ICJ
The International Court of Justice's second and third provisional measures orders in South Africa v. Israel: the 28 March 2024 order on famine and humanitarian access, and the 24 May 2024 order directing Israel to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah.
Norwegian Refugee Council — Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance (ICLA), Palestine
Norwegian Refugee Council
NRC's legal-aid programme in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza: free information, counselling and representation on housing, land and property — demolition, eviction and confiscation orders, access restrictions, and documentation.
Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR)
PCHR
Based in Gaza, PCHR monitors and documents violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, provides legal aid, and advocates before international bodies.
UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel — 2024 Reports
UN Commission of Inquiry
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry's 2024 reports: the June 2024 report (A/HRC/56/26) on the 7 October 2023 attacks and Israel's military operations in Gaza, and the September 2024 report (A/79/232) on attacks on Gaza's healthcare system, Palestinian detainees, and hostages.
UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories — Human Rights Council mandate
Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
An independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur investigates and reports publicly on Israel's violations of international law in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, reporting annually to the Human Rights Council.
UNRWA — UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
UNRWA
Established by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) in December 1949, UNRWA provides education, health care, and relief to millions of registered Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.
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