Earlier this month a global protest movement, sustained diplomatic pressure and historic legal interventions brought about a long-awaited ceasefire in Gaza. With many hopeful that the cessation in hostilities will become permanent (though there are already signs Israel is not respecting the ceasefire), the world’s focus has begun to slowly shift towards holding the perpetrators of the genocide accountable. Will the progress made in 2024 towards legally restricting and punishing Israeli leaders and soldiers deliver concrete action this year? We spoke to several legal experts to find out.

A historic year.

By all accounts, 2024 was a turning point in the fight to hold Israel, its politicians, military and government officials accountable for its violations of international law.

Last year started with South Africa submitting its case to the international court of justice (ICJ) in January, accusing Israel of committing acts of genocide in Gaza. Two weeks later, the ICJ issued its historic finding of plausible genocide, ordering Israel to take six provisional measures to ensure that genocidal acts were not being committed.

In May, the ICJ intervened again, ordering Israel to immediately halt its ground invasion of Rafah, the humanitarian zone which at the time harboured 1.4 million Palestinians. In July, the ICJ issued a landmark advisory opinion declaring for the first time that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem illegal.

Most recently, in November, the international criminal court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar (both since killed by Israel), for suspected war crimes.

On the face of it, these measures have been ineffective at restraining Israel’s war, which has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians by conservative estimates. Yet they have, experts say, had an effect on Israel’s outlook.

“None of it is a silver bullet, but it has put Israel and Israeli officials on notice that their crimes are being called out – that there is a threat of accountability for their actions – and it certainly makes their world a lot smaller,” Yasmine Ahmed, UK director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and a human rights lawyer, told Novara Media.

It has certainly brought to an end decades of legally-facilitated impunity.

75 years of impunity.

Since its foundation in 1948, Israel has faced virtually no legal consequences for its actions. This is largely thanks to the unconditional support it receives from Western powers, particularly the United States, which has wielded its political influence to shield Israel from accountability.

At the UN security council, the US has used its veto to block 49 resolutions – that can obligate states to implement measures such as sanctions and arms embargoes – on Israel’s actions since 1945. This is more than half the vetoes the US used in that period and includes four vetoed ceasefire resolutions since October 2023.

Meanwhile, Israel and its allies have relentlessly undermined the work of international legal institutions. This has included levying allegations of antisemitism against both the ICC and ICJ, as well as a decade-long campaign of spying, hacking and threatening ICC lawyers investigating Israeli war crimes. Just two weeks ago, the US House of Representatives voted to sanction the court in protest at its arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, a move that could seriously hinder the ICC’s work.

Israel also benefits from the fact that international law lacks any kind of enforcement mechanism, relying instead on states’ cooperation. This is particularly difficult in the case of Israel, which does not recognise the courts’ authority.

Israel is not a party to the Rome statute that established the ICC. Some countries such as France have argued that this gives Netanyahu and Gallant immunity from the arrest warrants. Senior lecturer in international criminal and humanitarian law at Nottingham University Luigi Daniele told Novara Media that this notion is “beyond preposterous and hypocritical”.

“It’s irrelevant in this case, legally, that Israel is not a party to the ICC,” he said, emphasising that the obligation to enforce the court’s rulings remains for state parties to the ICC.

Both Daniele and Ahmed cite the analogous example of the ICC arrest warrant issued for Putin in March 2023 for war crimes, which western nations vowed to enforce despite Russia also not signing the Rome statute.

Following each attempt to hold it accountable under international law, Israel has responded with defiance by intensifying its military assault – indiscriminately bombing civilian areas, targeting hospitals and blocking humanitarian aid to exact revenge. In the 48 hours following the ICJ’s order to immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah, Israel bombed the area more than 60 times.

“There is this escalatory response every time,” noted Daniele, one “which says: ‘How dare you touch us, how dare you judge us? We are the sole judges in our cause.’” More than that, he adds, Israel’s continued escalations send a message that “efforts for accountability actually make the situation worse, so no one should dare to do so.”

But despite this message, the measures of the past year have slowly but surely chipped away at Israel’s impunity. Several factors will determine whether this seemingly impenetrable shield crumbles in 2025.

‘The ultimate clash.’

2025 will likely see Israel battling international legal proceedings aimed at holding its government and military officials accountable in courtrooms in the Hague and around the world.

More countries continue to join South Africa’s case at the ICJ accusing Israel of genocide, including Ireland and Cuba this month. In October, South Africa filed a document with the court containing more than 750 pages of evidence for its ongoing case. As investigators and forensic teams enter Gaza in the coming months, fresh evidence will likely bolster legal proceedings.

Though Israel is not itself party to the Rome statute, at least 124 countries are, and therefore obliged to enforce the ICC’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. However, the reluctance or outright defiance of the warrants shown by several of Israel’s closest allies, including the UK, Germany and France, and the historical reluctance to arrest sitting heads of state, makes it unlikely that 2025 will see Netanyahu in handcuffs – though Gallant has significantly less political immunity.

But accountability will not only be reserved for Israel’s top leadership. 2025 is likely to see a major escalation in efforts to prosecute those responsible for the genocide in Gaza.

The Hind Rajab Foundation is one of many organisations in a global network of civil society, activists and lawyers compiling evidence of Israeli soldiers’ actions in Gaza, mostly from soldiers’ social media posts. It has already filed dozens of cases against individual soldiers, both at the ICC and in national and local courts.

Here, HRW’s Yasmine Ahmed explains, the success of legal proceedings will depend on whether national courts enforce arrest warrants against individual soldiers within their territory, and dual nationals of their country (one 2018 estimate suggested that roughly 10% of Israelis held more than one nationality).

Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, all states can prosecute non-nationals for war crimes and other grave violations of international law. Historically, universal jurisdiction has been invoked to arrest and prosecute Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and leaders from Rwanda, Syria and Myanmar, but usually target high-ranking officials.

In October, the Belgian federal prosecutor opened a war crimes probe into a Belgian-Israeli national. In Brazil, a judge ordered an investigation into an Israeli soldier on vacation, before Israel intervened to help him flee the country. Similar cases have taken place in Morocco, Sweden, Sri Lanka and Cyprus, demonstrating a growing global political will to hold Israel accountable.

Still, no arrests or prosecutions have yet succeeded. This is in part because, in the time it takes for a court to review evidence, soldiers often leave the country. It’s also unclear whether social media posts and videos will constitute enough evidence for a war crimes conviction.

But the looming threat of accountability has already triggered panic among the Israeli government, which is warning soldiers to cover their faces and conceal their full names before posting on social media and consult with a lawyer before travelling abroad.

Despite these efforts at the international level, Ahmed says she remains concerned about Israel’s continued and even worsening abuses of international law in the occupied territories.

“On the ground, what we’re seeing is a further emboldened Israeli government that continues to scale these violations up, including in the West Bank, where it continues to expand settlements and to directly and indirectly support settler violence,” she said.

Israeli forces marked the Gaza ceasefire by launching a military operation across the West Bank, conducting air strikes and raids in Jenin which have killed at least 12 Palestinians.

Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president this week could also spell more violence on the ground for Palestinians. Trump recently said he is “not confident” the ceasefire deal will hold, and he issued an executive order on his first day in office to remove sanctions on violent Israeli settlers issued by the Biden administration.

Despite the various legal, political and logistical hurdles to Israeli accountability, ongoing efforts have, Daniele believes, significantly shifted Israel’s standing on the international stage.

“You can clearly see a rift between a previous era, in which Israel’s exceptionalism fended off any accountability, and the new era in which these strategies are failing because the demand for accountability is more and more universal,” he explained. This is what Daniele and the Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal have termed the “twilight of Israel exceptionalism”.

For Daniele, legal interventions like the ICJ rulings and ICC arrest warrants carry significance beyond Palestine. He argues they represent the ultimate clash between a world order in which western nations have been allowed to operate above the law and a new era of internationalism.

“It’s not just about delivering justice for Palestinian victims or Lebanese victims, which would have been sufficient. It’s the ultimate clash between a rogue regime and the international legal architecture,” he said.

While he is sceptical that legal institutions are robust enough to restrain Israel, the alternative, he says, is unthinkable. “These institutions are far from perfect,” he added, “but either we implement the rules that we have, or new global wars will write the new rules, potentially nuclear wars, in which we are all defeated.”