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The decision sends the jurisdictional fight back to the ICC lower court to fully explore Israel's jurisdictional objections to the arrest warrants.
In a potential historic comeback, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court on Thursday reversed the November 2024 ruling of the ICC lower court against Israel’s jurisdictional objections to the issuing of arrest warrants for alleged war crimes against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant.
The ruling is Israel’s first big win before the ICC since a win it obtained in 2012, and this after a string of losses in 2019, 2021, and November 2024 in which the war crimes proceedings against Israel continued to proceed from initial stages to interim stages, threatening to getting to even later stages, such as indictments.
The decision sends the jurisdictional fight back to the ICC lower court to more fully explore Israel’s jurisdictional objections to the arrest warrants and the ICC’s intervention into Israel’s conduct of the current Gaza war more generally.
Until the ICC lower court holds additional hearings on the issue, which could easily take a few months, and maybe even much longer, the whole case against Israel will be frozen.
The arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant technically have not been frozen, but given that the lower court could decide to cancel them after hearing Israel’s full jurisdictional objections, many countries that are members of the ICC may now feel more free to ignore the arrest warrants until a final ruling is reached.
According to the ICC Appeals Court, “Israel’s challenge to the jurisdiction of the Court pursuant to article 19(2) of the Statute should not have been dismissed as premature.”
The ICC lower court had said that the arrests could go forward even if there was no final determination on Israel’s jurisdictional objections, as these objections could be dealt with at the indictment stage or some other later stage.
