Shuhada Street in Hebron/al-Khalil (Photo: gettingoffthearmchair.wordpress.com)
At the end of 2008, Israel went to war on the Gaza Strip on a scale not seen in Palestine for decades. The Israeli military’s International Law Department had spent months prior crafting ‘legal advice that allowed for large numbers of civilian casualties’. This heralded the starting point of formal Palestinian interaction with the International Criminal Court, with an initial failed attempt by the Palestinian authorities to trigger ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed in occupied Palestine. It would be a long twelve years before eventually, in February and March 2021, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that the Court does indeed have jurisdiction and the Prosecutor confirmed that an investigation will now proceed. Through these years, the Office of the Prosecutor often appeared at pains to draw out the wrangling over the preliminary question of whether it could accept jurisdictio