Palestinian rights groups, including Al-Haq and Defence for Children International-Palestine, spent years collecting survivor testimony, photographic evidence and affidavits before the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in November 2024 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Israel has denied wrongdoing.

In 2021, Israel designated six Palestinian civil society organisations as terrorist groups, and the following year Israeli forces raided and shut their offices in the occupied West Bank — a move condemned by United Nations experts and international rights bodies.

The pressure has extended to international prosecutors. Former ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said unknown men appeared at her home in The Hague and delivered an envelope of cash — a message, she understood, that they knew her address. Phone numbers they left behind traced to Israel, she said.

She also described a meeting with the then-head of Israeli intelligence in New York in which she was pressured to halt the Palestine investigation.

Israel has not publicly commented on the specific allegations.

In 2020, the first Trump administration sanctioned Bensouda personally, freezing bank accounts and blocking financial transactions for her and her family members.

The current Trump administration extended such measures in February 2025 following the Netanyahu warrant, sanctioning sitting prosecutor Karim Khan and several ICC judges. Khan said in May 2026 that states were making a “dangerous” attempt to remove him from his post.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has documented conditions in Palestinian territory, was sanctioned by Washington in July 2025, though a US federal appeals court later reinstated a temporary block on those measures after brief legal reversals.

In January 2025, a colleague at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Ihab Marwan Kamal Faisal, was killed along with his family in an Israeli air strike in Gaza.

A 64-nation bloc including Arab states, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and several Security Council members called at the UN in early June 2026 for “meaningful consequences” for violations, citing recent ICC rulings and UN resolutions. Enforcement, however, remains elusive.