Maureen Clare Murphy
1 June 2026
The Gaza reconstruction plan is displayed during the Board of Peace meeting at the Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, 19 February. Alessandro Di MeoANSA via ZUMA Press
More than half a year after the US president announced a ceasefire deal to end Israel’s military offensive, little has changed for Palestinians in Gaza who have endured more than two years of relentless attacks and deprivation of the necessities of life.
Authorities in Gaza, human rights groups and aid organizations are warning that despite the nominal ceasefire, Israel is still using food as a weapon of war while Palestinian families, denied adequate shelter, are being made to live in deplorable and unsafe conditions.
Around 940 people in Gaza have been killed since the supposed ceasefire went into effect in October 2025, bringing the death toll since October 2023 to more than 72,940, as of 1 June.
Around a third of those killed since the ceasefire were targeted near the so-called yellow line demarcating the nearly two-thirds of Gaza’s territory where Israeli ground troops remain deployed, according to the UN human rights office.
“The available information raises serious concerns that the Israeli army is shooting at and killing presumed civilians simply on the basis of their proximity to the so-called yellow line, which would amount to unlawful killings and thus war crimes,” Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN human rights office in the occupied Palestinian territory, told Reuters.
The dead in Gaza also include dozens of civilian police personnel, many killed while on duty, while Israel-backed armed gangs attempt to undermine attempts by the authorities in Gaza to maintain civil order. Israel has also assassinated the leaders of Hamas’ military wing in their homes along with their family members, as well as the son of Hamas’ chief negotiator.
In April alone, at least 111 people, including 18 children and seven women, were killed in Israeli airstrikes, shelling and by drone attacks and gunfire in Gaza.
Warnings of “total collapse”
All captives held in Gaza since October 2023 have been released by armed groups as part of the deal. But instead of withdrawing, Israel’s ground forces are now in direct control of more of Gaza’s territory than the 53 percent mapped in the ceasefire deal, pushing Palestinians ever closer to the sea.
In recent days, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said that he directed the military to seize 70 percent of Gaza’s territory.
And instead of allowing for the surge in unfettered aid called for by the ceasefire, Israel is delaying, blocking and otherwise hindering the delivery of life-saving assistance.
On 14 May, World Central Kitchen announced that while there was no reduction in the need for food assistance in Gaza, it was reducing the number of meals it is cooking to pre-ceasefire levels due to financial and capacity restraints.
“We specialize in emergency food relief, not long-term food security,” the US charity said. “Governments, institutions and international partners need to commit the sustained, secure funding that this crisis demands.”
After three people were killed in an Israeli airstrike targeting a community kitchen in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, on 17 May, the Palestinian human rights group Al Mezan said that Israel was pushing “humanitarian conditions toward total collapse … as part of a systematic policy of using starvation as a weapon.”
On 25 May, on the eve of the Eid al-Adha holiday, the Government Media Office in Gaza warned of a “dangerous and unprecedented” worsening of the already catastrophic humanitarian situation amid the ongoing Israeli blockade.
Basic foods were in short supply amid “soaring rates of poverty and displacement” in Gaza, where the unemployment rate has risen to nearly 80 percent.
Less than a third of the number of trucks stipulated in the ceasefire agreement have entered Gaza, the Government Media Office added, “a dangerously low figure that is utterly insufficient to address the escalating humanitarian, food, health and relief needs.”
Palestinians walk through al-Zawiya market in Gaza City on 26 May ahead of Eid al-Adha. Bilal OsamaAPA images
During a recent press conference at the UN Correspondents Association press room in New York, Janti Soeripto, the head of Save the Children US, said that children are still arriving at the charity’s clinics showing signs of acute malnutrition.
Soeripto was joined by the principals of Oxfam America and Refugees International, as well as a medical doctor who worked at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital during April, to ring the alarm bell that the basic needs of Palestinians in Gaza are not being met.
Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, said that Israel “is continuing … to systematically obstruct humanitarian aid,” including by deregistering aid workers and organizations, while the US was failing to hold Israel to its commitments.
The result is that “people cannot get enough food, children and families are camped out in raw sewage waiting for any kind of proper shelter.”
Konyndyk added that the obstruction of aid doesn’t only violate UN Security Council Resolution 2803, which endorses the Gaza ceasefire and conferred legitimacy onto the US president’s Board of Peace. Nor does it only contradict Israel’s commitments under the ceasefire deal.
“It is an outright violation of obligations under international humanitarian law, completely irrespective of any UN Security Council resolution or peace commitments.”
“There is no legal basis” for conditioning the facilitation of humanitarian aid on political concessions, Konyndyk added.
Bait and switch
Humanitarian aid groups attempting to deliver life essentials in Gaza say that Israel is the party violating the agreement in the ceasefire deal and hindering a surge in aid – what should be the most straightforward and uncomplicated aspect of the agreement to execute.
And yet the Board of Peace’s report to the UN Security Council on the implementation of the ceasefire deal obscures Israel’s responsibility for the current situation in Gaza, placing the blame for the ongoing impasse on Hamas and other armed groups for their refusal to give up arms.
Israel is not faulted by name in the report, despite the hundreds of people killed and thousands injured in Gaza since October, the continued obstruction of aid and other blatant violations of both the ceasefire deal and international law.
For its part, Hamas accuses the US and Israel of moving the goalposts and trying to “implement terms that Hamas never agreed to – specifically, disarming the resistance while Israeli forces continue to occupy most of Gaza and violate the ceasefire on a daily basis,” as Drop Site reported.
Based on interviews with the leaders of Palestinian resistance factions, Drop Site added that Palestinian negotiators argue that Washington and Tel Aviv have scrapped the narrow terms of the October agreement – which is categorically different from the 20-point “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” dated 29 September 2025, published by the White House, and replaced it with the 15-point framework that was presented to Hamas in this April and summarized by the Bulgarian politician and diplomat Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative of the Board of Peace, on X.
That agreement, as Drop Site summarizes, “demands the total disarmament of the Palestinian resistance as a prerequisite to implementing the terms of the signed deal” – in other words, the “total victory” and surrender of Hamas that Israel was unable to achieve on the battlefield.
Mohammed Al-Hindi, the chief negotiator for Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was involved in the October deal, told Drop Site that the position of the resistance is that weapons are a “national issue to be discussed in the second phase [of the ceasefire deal], and that before entering the second phase, the first phase must be implemented.”
Hamas and other factions maintain that they did not agree to anything beyond the six-step ceasefire agreement that dealt with the release of all captives in Gaza, living and dead, in exchange for Palestinians held by Israel; the cessation of all military operations; partial withdrawal of the Israeli military; and the “full entry of humanitarian aid and relief.”
“Officially, there is no deal on the terms of a ‘second phase,’” Drop Site added.
Despite this, Hamas says that it has created a mechanism for handing over power over Gaza’s civil affairs to the National Committee for Administration of Gaza created by the Board of Peace. However, Israel has not allowed the committee to enter Gaza and, according to Hamas leader Osama Hamdan, Mladenov “has failed to convince the Israelis or compel them.”
The site of an overnight Israeli airstrike on residential block in Jabaliya, northern Gaza, 19 May. Bilal OsamaAPA images
Instead, Mladenov appears to be singularly focused on pressuring Hamas.
The Times of Israel reported in May that Mladenov warned Hamas in a letter that failure to accept the Board of Peace’s disarmament framework would render the commitments of the ceasefire deal “null and void.”
The warning can be reasonably interpreted as a threat to resume Israel’s high-intensity attacks on Gaza that have killed tens of thousands of people – presumable acts of genocide, according to a preliminary ruling of the International Court of Justice – and a further tightening of the siege and return to famine conditions met with an arrest warrant for Netanyhau from the International Criminal Court.
Mladenov’s letter was co-authored by Aryeh Lightstone, a senior adviser to Trump envoy Steve Witkoff. During Trump’s first administration, Lightstone was senior adviser to David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, and was appointed special envoy for economic normalization for the advancement of the Abraham Accords – the full normalization of relations between the United Arab Emirates and Israel that was hailed by Trump as a “historic diplomatic breakthrough” when the agreement was inked in 2020.
Mladenov, who also heads a UAE government diplomatic training institute, championed the normalization deals ushered in during Trump’s first administration while he was the UN secretary-general’s Middle East envoy.
Mladenov’s style of diplomacy then, as now, is to “badger Palestinians into accepting an unjust status quo while making little to no demands on Israel,” as this writer put it in 2020.
While delivering ultimatums and threats to Hamas, Mladenov is handling Israel and its prime minister, wanted by the ICC for alleged war crimes, with kid gloves.
The Bulgarian diplomat stated on 5 May that he had a “positive and substantive discussion” with Netanyahu during which “we all reaffirmed our commitment to the full implementation of President Trump’s 20-Point Comprehensive Plan.”
The following day, Israel targeted Azzam al-Hayya – the son of Khalil al-Hayya, the head of Hamas’ political bureau and the faction’s lead negotiator – killing him and another person and injuring nine others in the Gaza City attack.
Mladenov has made no condemnations of Israel’s assassinations or slaughter of civilians in Gaza during the nominal ceasefire while obscuring Israel’s obstruction of aid – a blatant violation of the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 provisional measures to prevent genocide, its subsequent additional measures and October 2025 advisory opinion finding that Israel’s restrictions on aid into Gaza breached international law.
Meanwhile the Board of Peace smeared internationals participating in a solidarity flotilla aimed at breaking the siege on Gaza, calling their advocacy “performative love-boat activism of people who know nothing of and care even less for the condition of Gazans.”
In the same post on X, the Board of Peace claimed that it had “SIGNIFICANTLY scaled up support for the people of Gaza” and stated that “Hamas’ theft of aid has dwindled from 90 percent to less than 1 percent” – even though it was Israeli-backed militias that had routinely intercepted and looted aid trucks in Gaza in the months leading up to the ceasefire.
There is no evidence to support the claim that Hamas, which says it has lost hundreds of officers and security guards in Israeli attacks while they were attempting to protect aid convoys, engaged in significant theft of aid, as determined by an internal US government analysis and acknowledged by Israeli military officials.
And while the Board of Peace crudely twists the facts on X, its high representative is engaged in slightly more sophisticated if no less harmful obfuscation.
Mladenov’s report to the Security Council on the implementation of Trump’s Gaza plan discusses the blocking of aid in “very oblique, roundabout terms,” Refugee International’s Konyndyk stated during the UN Correspondents Association press conference. “But at no point does it ever acknowledge … the continued pattern of obstruction by the Israeli government in direct contradiction to their obligations under the ceasefire deal.”
Konyndyk said that Mladenov telling the Security Council during his briefing that every element in phase one must be upheld “is a backward way of acknowledging that it has not been.”
“If the guarantors of the deal cannot even hold the Israeli government accountable for meeting basic humanitarian obligations, what realistic prospect is there that the parties will be held to account for the more complicated political and security elements of the deal?” Konyndyk asked.
Bankrupt board
While the Board of Peace’s high representative insists that full disarmament in Gaza is the key to unlocking every other aspect of Trump’s plan, he acknowledged in his report to the Security Council that the billions of funds committed for the execution of Trump’s plan have not been disbursed.
The Guardian reported during May that of the $7 billion pledged during the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace, only $23 million for overhead costs and $100 million to fund a future police force has been delivered – amounting to “$1.75 for every $100 pledged.”
An estimated $71.4 billion is needed for recovery and reconstruction in Gaza, according to a European Union, United Nations and World Bank assessment published in April.
From the beginning, the Board of Peace failed to win over the European Union, which has not joined the organization due to its naked attempt to bypass and undermine the United Nations.
Mohammed R. Mhawish, reporting for New York magazine, observes that “under its own logic, the three active military fronts currently disrupting the Middle East — Gaza, Lebanon and Iran — are theaters of war that should be resolved by the Board, if only they were not being waged by two Board members, the US and Israel.”
Whatever illusion of American protection guarantees that lured Gulf states to join the Board was shattered when the US and Israel jointly attacked Iran from military bases in their countries.
Damage to energy assets resulting from the attacks on Iran and its reprisal strikes on oil and gas facilities in nearby Gulf states may amount to $58 billion for repair costs alone, according to the research firm Rystad.
Gulf states UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were among the handful of countries that made pledges to the Board of Peace weeks before the surprise attack on Iran.
Counting on the US to provide stability is now a harder sell, and the Board of Peace’s empty coffers can be reasonably viewed as a vote of no confidence by states who had initially pledged.
An unnamed source described as “familiar with” the Board of Peace told The Guardian that “the worst outcome is that Hamas agrees to disarmament, and then says ‘go ahead, start delivering’ … What will they [the Board of Peace] do?”
Reuters reported that the US is “considering asking Israel to give some of the tax money it is withholding from the Palestinian Authority to Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to fund the US president’s post-war plan for Gaza.”
The mere suggestion of any such proposal is an indicator of the Board’s desperation and recklessness.
The Palestinian Authority says that Israel is withholding some $5 billion in taxes, amounting to around half the PA’s annual budget. Israel’s withholding of the funds that it collects on behalf of the PA has “set off a financial crisis in the West Bank, with the PA slashing salaries of thousands of civil servants,” according to Reuters.
The real plan for Gaza
The Trump fantasy for Gaza, illustrated with glittery AI-generated graphics by the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, upon the plan’s reveal, has no Palestinian involvement and no money.
It also has no legitimacy.
The US joined the Board of Peace “through an executive order signed by Trump, who invoked a federal statute that normally requires congressional backing for American participation in international institutions,” Mhawish writes.
The Board charter has not been approved by the Senate, which approves international treaties, and the body “has no permanent relationship to any durable US or international institution, as the UN Security Council’s endorsement is set to expire at the end of next year.”
Trump would remain permanent chair even when his term ends and “the next administration would have no viable method to redirect funds, significantly restructure the Board, or undo the plans already set in motion.”
The “multilateral organization … created out of thin air,” as Mhawish puts it, has failed to consolidate the support and funding it would need to actually function.
Displaced Palestinians live in worn tents amid deteriorating humanitarian conditions and severe shortages of food, water and healthcare at Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City, 20 May. Bilal OsamaAPA images
But in the meantime, the Board of Peace is providing Israel with diplomatic cover to advance its strategic goals: systematically destroying homes in the areas under its control to prevent their displaced residents from returning and to render the landscape unrecognizable and uninhabitable in pursuit of its genocidal aims of destroying the conditions of life for Palestinians in Gaza.
Israeli leaders have not shied from expressing their desire to empty Gaza of its Palestinian population – the majority of them originally forcibly displaced during the violent creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian land conquered in 1948.
On 26 May, Israel Katz, the Israeli defense minister, reiterated the aim of “voluntary emigration … from Gaza” – a euphemism for forcible mass transfer.
Israel intends “to end the Palestinian presence in the Gaza Strip,” Hamas leader Osama Hamdan told Drop Site. “They are trying to send a message to the Palestinians that there is no solution within Palestine, and that the only solution is for them to leave.”
Sara Roy of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern studies similarly told Mhawish, the writer for New York magazine, that the Board of Peace vision for Gaza, as a proxy for that of the Israeli government, is about “eliminating Gaza as the center of resistance, and about ending the whole Palestinian political project to which Gaza is the key.”
Were Hamas and other resistance factions to agree to surrender arms, leaving Palestinians in Gaza totally defenseless, this would indeed be the key to unlocking the rest of Israel’s plan for Gaza, cloaked in the fake language of diplomacy and peace.
Has Trump torpedoed the ICC’s Gaza probe?
Maureen Clare Murphy
Activists pose with a mock-up gallows protesting Israel’s new death penalty for Palestinians law outside the International Criminal Court in The Hague on 17 April, the annual commemoration of Palestinian Prisoners Day. James PetermeierZUMA Press Wire
“I am very proud that we are sanctioned,” Raji Sourani, the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said of the administration of US President Donald Trump and the Treasury Department’s orders criminalizing four prominent Palestinian groups during a recent event in The Hague.
For Sourani, the criminalization of four Palestinian human rights organizations by Israel’s principal ally is an indicator of their effectiveness in threatening the decades of impunity that paved the way for the genocide in Gaza.
“We inflicted pain on those criminals,” Sourani said during the launch of a report on the impact of sanctions imposed by the US president on 11 officials elected to the International Criminal Court, including judges and prosecutors, and other human rights defenders.
“They worry and they know that if we proceed rightly, using the law effectively … they will know where this will end up,” a defiant Sourani added. “As all criminals in history, they will be held accountable.”
But under the sanctions, it is human rights defenders, international lawyers, judges and experts who are being treated as criminals – even those living outside the US and who are not subject to its domestic law.
Francesca Albanese, an independent UN human rights expert, has also been sanctioned under Trump’s executive order for her work carried out under her mandate as special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 – despite her status granting her immunities under a convention adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1946. She is the first holder of a UN mandate to be subjected to sanctions in the history of the world body.
Albanese and her husband, who are Italian nationals, and their 13-year-old daughter, a US citizen, lost access to the US, including their property in Washington, under the sanctions. Albanese, who can no longer open a bank account, has likened the impact of sanctions to being condemned to “civil death.”
Albanese announced on 13 May that a US court suspended the sanctions imposed on her following a lawsuit filed by her husband and daughter.
A federal judge stated that Albanese was designated as punishment for First Amendment-protected speech, and that she had sufficient connections to the US to enjoy constitutional protections.
The judge’s ruling does not have any bearing on the sanctions imposed on any sanctioned individuals and organizations besides Albanese.
The sanctions lump international lawyers and judges with drug traffickers and “terrorists,” disrupting their lives and their work and cutting them off from their property, bank accounts and nearly anything that relies on digital services or the use of a credit card – including being able to simply buy a subway ticket.
All individuals and institutions sanctioned by the Trump administration were interviewed by the Coalition for the International Criminal Court for its 90-page report titled “Criminalizing Accountability.”
The report demonstrates how US sanctions have profoundly disrupted the lives of designated individuals and the staff of designated organizations and their families due to “the extraordinary global reach of the US banking, information technology and service sectors.”
Washington’s targeting of the ICC also threatens “accountability efforts for victims and survivors across all ongoing investigations,” from the Philippines to Venezuela, the report states.
Moreover, the ability of the US to exploit global dependency on technology and services based in the country “poses a threat … to the sovereignty, independence and security of states and their nationals.”
Additional arrest warrants rumors
Like Israel, the US is not a member state of the International Criminal Court or a signatory to its founding treaty, the Rome Statute. That statute allows for investigation of the nationals of states that aren’t party to the court if the alleged crimes occurred in the territory of an ICC member state.
Palestine joined the ICC in 2015 after it was admitted as a state to the United Nations.
While the administration of US President Joe Biden reversed sanctions imposed on Fatou Bensouda and two other court officials designated during Trump’s first term, it opposed the court’s investigation into suspected Israeli war crimes that was opened in early 2021.
DAWN, a human rights group based in Washington, has urged the ICC to investigate senior Biden administration officials, including the former US president, “for their accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.”
Karim Khan, the current ICC chief prosecutor, announced in November 2024 that the court had issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, citing the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza “and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts,” among other serious violations. Arrest warrants were also issued for three Hamas leaders who were all eventually confirmed to have been killed.
Khan was reportedly investigating far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir before he went on leave following allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of authority last year. When announcing the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Khan suggested that there may be additional charges over alleged international crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.
Khan, who rejects the misconduct claims, was cleared of wrongdoing by three judges following a UN investigation, Middle East Eye reported in March.
The misconduct allegations are still being reviewed by the executive bureau of the Assembly of States Parties, the governance and management body of the court.
There has been little public activity by the overstretched and underfunded court on the Palestine investigation during Khan’s ongoing and indefinite leave of absence. His leave “brought the work of the court to a virtual standstill,” the The New Yorker stated in an October 2025 article on the misconduct scandal.
Recent reports indicate that the wheels of international justice may be slowly moving in the meantime, however.
An unnamed source told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that Khan requested arrest warrants for Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. In its report published on 17 May, Haaretz added that a “diplomatic source” said that Orit Strook, an Israeli lawmaker, and two Israeli military officials, were also being investigated.
The ICC has denied that new arrest warrants were issued in the Palestine case. It is possible that the applications for arrest warrants were prepared by Khan before his leave of absence or that his request is still under review by judges.
Since the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were announced, the ICC amended its regulations so that applications for arrest warrants “must remain secret and can only be made public with the permission of the judges.”
“You have been warned”
The degree to which political intrigue is at play in the misconduct probe that has paralyzed Khan’s work at the ICC is unclear, though Khan was reportedly threatened by Nick Kaufman, a British-Israeli lawyer who claimed to be informally advising Gallant, less than two weeks before the sexual misconduct allegations were leaked to the media.
Khan was also subject to pressure by David Cameron, the UK’s foreign secretary at the time, and Lindsey Graham, the senior US senator. He also “received a security briefing that indicated that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, was active in The Hague and posed a potential threat to the prosecutor,” according to Middle East Eye.
“Target Israel and we will target you,” a dozen Republican US senators, including Marco Rubio, the current secretary of state, warned in an April 2024 letter to Khan.
While tremendous pressure has been brought to bear on Khan and the court over its Palestine file, Israel’s underhanded efforts to consolidate its impunity began much earlier.
Israel mobilized its various intelligence apparatuses in a shadow “war” to try to put an end to the court’s preliminary examination and, later, its full investigation. Netanyahu viewed the tribunal as a “strategic threat” long before Khan’s term as chief prosecutor.
The misconduct allegations have all but spelled out the downfall of Khan, who was the first current ICC official to be sanctioned during Trump’s second administration. The criminalization of those upholding international law may result in the collapse of the court itself, which is being held up by the fortitude of its remaining staff with little meaningful support by the states that built the court.
The Coalition for the ICC observes that the sanctions against court officials have been “widely denounced” by states around the globe but the designation of the Palestinian human rights groups “have been met with a worrying silence.”
Nor has the ICC or the Assembly of States Parties made any public statements about the criminalization of the Palestinian groups for their work with the court.
But even if sanctioned court officials have received statements of support, they have seen little pushback by state parties to the ICC against the sanctions and practical support for those targeted by Washington.
One exception to this is Spain’s request that the European Commission activate a statute that would prohibit compliance with the sanctions by companies, nationals and residents of the EU.
The response from the UN General Assembly and secretary-general to the sanctions on a UN mandate holder has been “muted … in stark contrast with two previous occasions where coercive measures were used against UN independent experts,” according to the Coalition for the ICC report.
“So far no one wants to stand in the face of the bully,” Albanese said during the launch of the report.
This inaction “greatly impacts the functioning of the UN and has a chilling effect on the UN and on individuals, in particular people engaged in investigative work,” Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and one of three investigators on the UN Commission of Inquiry examining Israel’s system of oppression as a whole, told the Coalition for the ICC.
“A form of secondary victimization”
The aim of the sanctions is to “target a few with the aim of impacting the whole,” Agnès Callamard, the head of Amnesty International, told the Coalition for the ICC.
“The consequences have been immediate, and the impact on the daily lives of those designated, and their families … has been striking,” the coalition states in its report.
The documentation and advocacy work of the Palestinian human rights groups placed under sanctions – Al-Haq, Addameer, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights – has been profoundly disrupted.
They are “unable to receive funds or to process payments such as salaries, rent or other office expenses essential to their operations,” the report states.
Senior staff members with dual nationalities have had to resign and the organizations lost significant amounts of funding from not only the US, but also European donors.
Their websites, email lists, social media accounts and other digital services were shut down, resulting in the “permanent deletion of hundreds, if not thousands, of videos, documentaries and victim testimonies about violations in Palestine.”
The sanctions follow years of persecution and Israeli attacks that destroyed the offices of Al Mezan and PCHR, which are based in Gaza. Several PCHR employees and their family members were killed in Israeli attacks.
For human rights defenders in Gaza, access to their salaries is “a matter of survival” for them and their families, as the coalition states in its report.
Israel has denied international human rights organizations, investigators and journalists access to Gaza, where more than 260 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 2023, making the work of the targeted Palestinian groups all the more essential.
The organizations are moreover a link between victims and the International Criminal Court, and their criminalization is “a form of secondary victimization” for victims of grave abuses who are left wondering where to turn to, according to Margaret Sattherthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.
The sanctions have shaken civil society working on a range of issues and organizations in the US who “face exposure to criminal liability for routine acts” in their work towards justice and accountability, should they be viewed as providing “material support” to designated individuals and groups, the Coalition for the ICC states in its report.
The designated Palestinian groups have been outcast from networks and coalitions based in the US. Some US nationals even “took themselves off group chats and completely stopped engaging with designated individuals,” the coalition adds.
Groups based outside the US have also taken “steps to prevent their US staff from working with the designated organizations and individuals,” leaving their Palestinian human rights colleagues feeling abandoned and isolated.
“Financial warfare”
The US sanctions regime – the weaponization of American dominance over the international financial system as a “new form of financial warfare,” as the lawyer Gavin Sullivan told the Coalition for the ICC – came out of the so-called War on Terror in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks.
Dependence on networks linked to the US compels financial institutions in other countries to overly comply with the sanctions and cut “services to designated persons, even when domestic law does not mandate the termination of services,” the coalition explains in its report.
Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, said that not only were his bank accounts in the UK and Malaysia frozen, but his ex-wife’s bank account was “frozen when he tried to transfer money to her for their children,” the report states.
Family members of sanctioned court officials have also had US visas revoked and their Google, Apple and Amazon accounts canceled, with corporate monopolies instrumentalized “as proxy enforcement arms for sanctions,” according to the Coalition for the ICC.
The banks of the sanctioned Palestinian groups closed their accounts and they have been prevented “from transacting in any currency, even in the euro, Jordanian dinar or Israeli shekel.”
European banks “choose over-compliance,” violating the law by refusing to open a bank account for legal EU residents, who are guaranteed the right to a basic account.
The Trump administration has threatened to sanction the court itself if it doesn’t stop the investigation of Israeli and US nationals and amend the Rome Statute so the court can no longer prosecute nationals of non-state parties.
If the US makes good on its threat, it would immediately impact the ICC’s banking systems and financial transactions. It would affect all their investigations across all situations and the ability of the ICC Trust Fund for Victims to deliver reparations.
Already, the designations have “created a wave of fear among actors working on justice and accountability,” the Coalition for the ICC states.
For Nicolas Guillou, a French ICC judge, the greatest risk posed by the sanctions lies in this fear: “If judges are afraid to judge, prosecutors are afraid to prosecute and lawyers are afraid to defend, we are no longer in a state governed by the rule of law.”
This is the intangible, invisible impact, the coalition states, whether it be organizations not providing evidence or “friend of the court” briefs, to “senior experts not applying to be a judge or UN independent expert” out of fear of being criminalized.
“No other choice”
Giving in to pressure by Israel and its powerful allies to drop the Palestine file would irreversibly compromise the independence and impartiality of what is meant to be a court of last resort for the world’s most vulnerable victims.
“It should be the end [of the court], because then you are an instrument using the sword of justice solely against the enemies of the powerful,” Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, is quoted as saying in the report.
It would also represent a major defeat of the rule of law in favor of a world in which might makes right.
“The sanctions are imposed in the same manner as when medieval criminal thugs kidnapped judges, burnt court houses and killed witnesses,” Sidoti, the Australian expert, told the Coalition for the ICC.
The first wave of sanctions on ICC judges targeted four women from countries with marginal power relative to the countries of the judges who were initially spared, though sanctions have also targeted nationals of key US allies, including Canada and the UK.
The coalition notes in its report that “beyond the ICC and those cooperating with it, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions against national judges, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and advocacy groups and movements under separate executive orders.”
Those orders are issued without any judicial oversight and designated individuals have “few, or no, due process protections.” Nor do they receive prior notice to their assets being frozen or access to the classified information used to support their designation.
“These actions directly violate the sovereignty of individual states,” the independence of their judiciaries and the rights of their citizens, the coalition adds.
The sanctions have “the potential to become a considerable threat to the rule of law worldwide and in Europe,” Guillou, the French judge at the ICC, states in the report.
Incidentally, the US company Expedia canceled a hotel reservation Guillou had made in Europe, citing the sanctions. Expedia was named in a recent report by the UN Human Rights Council as one of more than 150 companies with ties to Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.
A corporate accountability project of the American Friends Service Committee states that Expedia’s listings in settlements inherently discriminate against Palestinians, who are unable to access those properties. Some listings moreover “raise concerns of pillage, as the company is charging a commission on their booking without the freely given consent of the legal landowners.”
While denying services to sanctioned ICC officials like Guillou, companies like Expedia are profiting from violations of the international law that those sanctioned officials are working to uphold.
But despite everything they are up against, Palestinians human rights defenders vow to seek justice through whatever means necessary.
Palestinian human rights organizations tried to work with the Israeli justice system for decades, Issam Younis, director of Al Mezan, said during the launch of the Coalition for the ICC report in The Hague.
“It’s mission impossible,” Younis said of engaging with the Israeli system, leaving Palestinians victims wondering where to turn to. A window of opportunity was opened when Palestine was recognized as a UN member state and became a state party to the ICC.
“The minute that we decided to go there, we were subjected to unprecedented smear campaigns to delegitimize us and defund our organizations,” Younis said of Palestinian groups engaged with the court.
“We will never give up,” Younis added. “There is no other choice.”
Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada. She worked for Al-Haq between 2004 and 2006.
Maureen Clare Murphy
18 May 2026
Activists pose with a mock-up gallows protesting Israel’s new death penalty for Palestinians law outside the International Criminal Court in The Hague on 17 April, the annual commemoration of Palestinian Prisoners Day. James PetermeierZUMA Press Wire
“I am very proud that we are sanctioned,” Raji Sourani, the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, said of the administration of US President Donald Trump and the Treasury Department’s orders criminalizing four prominent Palestinian groups during a recent event in The Hague.
For Sourani, the criminalization of four Palestinian human rights organizations by Israel’s principal ally is an indicator of their effectiveness in threatening the decades of impunity that paved the way for the genocide in Gaza.
“We inflicted pain on those criminals,” Sourani said during the launch of a report on the impact of sanctions imposed by the US president on 11 officials elected to the International Criminal Court, including judges and prosecutors, and other human rights defenders.
“They worry and they know that if we proceed rightly, using the law effectively … they will know where this will end up,” a defiant Sourani added. “As all criminals in history, they will be held accountable.”
But under the sanctions, it is human rights defenders, international lawyers, judges and experts who are being treated as criminals – even those living outside the US and who are not subject to its domestic law.
Francesca Albanese, an independent UN human rights expert, has also been sanctioned under Trump’s executive order for her work carried out under her mandate as special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 – despite her status granting her immunities under a convention adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1946. She is the first holder of a UN mandate to be subjected to sanctions in the history of the world body.
Albanese and her husband, who are Italian nationals, and their 13-year-old daughter, a US citizen, lost access to the US, including their property in Washington, under the sanctions. Albanese, who can no longer open a bank account, has likened the impact of sanctions to being condemned to “civil death.”
Albanese announced on 13 May that a US court suspended the sanctions imposed on her following a lawsuit filed by her husband and daughter.
A federal judge stated that Albanese was designated as punishment for First Amendment-protected speech, and that she had sufficient connections to the US to enjoy constitutional protections.
The judge’s ruling does not have any bearing on the sanctions imposed on any sanctioned individuals and organizations besides Albanese.
The sanctions lump international lawyers and judges with drug traffickers and “terrorists,” disrupting their lives and their work and cutting them off from their property, bank accounts and nearly anything that relies on digital services or the use of a credit card – including being able to simply buy a subway ticket.
All individuals and institutions sanctioned by the Trump administration were interviewed by the Coalition for the International Criminal Court for its 90-page report titled “Criminalizing Accountability.”
The report demonstrates how US sanctions have profoundly disrupted the lives of designated individuals and the staff of designated organizations and their families due to “the extraordinary global reach of the US banking, information technology and service sectors.”
Washington’s targeting of the ICC also threatens “accountability efforts for victims and survivors across all ongoing investigations,” from the Philippines to Venezuela, the report states.
Moreover, the ability of the US to exploit global dependency on technology and services based in the country “poses a threat … to the sovereignty, independence and security of states and their nationals.”
Additional arrest warrants rumors
Like Israel, the US is not a member state of the International Criminal Court or a signatory to its founding treaty, the Rome Statute. That statute allows for investigation of the nationals of states that aren’t party to the court if the alleged crimes occurred in the territory of an ICC member state.
Palestine joined the ICC in 2015 after it was admitted as a state to the United Nations.
While the administration of US President Joe Biden reversed sanctions imposed on Fatou Bensouda and two other court officials designated during Trump’s first term, it opposed the court’s investigation into suspected Israeli war crimes that was opened in early 2021.
DAWN, a human rights group based in Washington, has urged the ICC to investigate senior Biden administration officials, including the former US president, “for their accessorial roles in aiding and abetting, as well as intentionally contributing to, Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.”
Karim Khan, the current ICC chief prosecutor, announced in November 2024 that the court had issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, citing the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza “and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts,” among other serious violations. Arrest warrants were also issued for three Hamas leaders who were all eventually confirmed to have been killed.
Khan was reportedly investigating far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir before he went on leave following allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of authority last year. When announcing the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Khan suggested that there may be additional charges over alleged international crimes in Gaza and the West Bank.
Khan, who rejects the misconduct claims, was cleared of wrongdoing by three judges following a UN investigation, Middle East Eye reported in March.
The misconduct allegations are still being reviewed by the executive bureau of the Assembly of States Parties, the governance and management body of the court.
There has been little public activity by the overstretched and underfunded court on the Palestine investigation during Khan’s ongoing and indefinite leave of absence. His leave “brought the work of the court to a virtual standstill,” the The New Yorker stated in an October 2025 article on the misconduct scandal.
Recent reports indicate that the wheels of international justice may be slowly moving in the meantime, however.
An unnamed source told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that Khan requested arrest warrants for Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. In its report published on 17 May, Haaretz added that a “diplomatic source” said that Orit Strook, an Israeli lawmaker, and two Israeli military officials, were also being investigated.
The ICC has denied that new arrest warrants were issued in the Palestine case. It is possible that the applications for arrest warrants were prepared by Khan before his leave of absence or that his request is still under review by judges.
Since the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were announced, the ICC amended its regulations so that applications for arrest warrants “must remain secret and can only be made public with the permission of the judges.”
“You have been warned”
The degree to which political intrigue is at play in the misconduct probe that has paralyzed Khan’s work at the ICC is unclear, though Khan was reportedly threatened by Nick Kaufman, a British-Israeli lawyer who claimed to be informally advising Gallant, less than two weeks before the sexual misconduct allegations were leaked to the media.
Khan was also subject to pressure by David Cameron, the UK’s foreign secretary at the time, and Lindsey Graham, the senior US senator. He also “received a security briefing that indicated that Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, was active in The Hague and posed a potential threat to the prosecutor,” according to Middle East Eye.
“Target Israel and we will target you,” a dozen Republican US senators, including Marco Rubio, the current secretary of state, warned in an April 2024 letter to Khan.
While tremendous pressure has been brought to bear on Khan and the court over its Palestine file, Israel’s underhanded efforts to consolidate its impunity began much earlier.
Israel mobilized its various intelligence apparatuses in a shadow “war” to try to put an end to the court’s preliminary examination and, later, its full investigation. Netanyahu viewed the tribunal as a “strategic threat” long before Khan’s term as chief prosecutor.
The misconduct allegations have all but spelled out the downfall of Khan, who was the first current ICC official to be sanctioned during Trump’s second administration. The criminalization of those upholding international law may result in the collapse of the court itself, which is being held up by the fortitude of its remaining staff with little meaningful support by the states that built the court.
The Coalition for the ICC observes that the sanctions against court officials have been “widely denounced” by states around the globe but the designation of the Palestinian human rights groups “have been met with a worrying silence.”
Nor has the ICC or the Assembly of States Parties made any public statements about the criminalization of the Palestinian groups for their work with the court.
But even if sanctioned court officials have received statements of support, they have seen little pushback by state parties to the ICC against the sanctions and practical support for those targeted by Washington.
One exception to this is Spain’s request that the European Commission activate a statute that would prohibit compliance with the sanctions by companies, nationals and residents of the EU.
The response from the UN General Assembly and secretary-general to the sanctions on a UN mandate holder has been “muted … in stark contrast with two previous occasions where coercive measures were used against UN independent experts,” according to the Coalition for the ICC report.
“So far no one wants to stand in the face of the bully,” Albanese said during the launch of the report.
This inaction “greatly impacts the functioning of the UN and has a chilling effect on the UN and on individuals, in particular people engaged in investigative work,” Chris Sidoti, an Australian human rights lawyer and one of three investigators on the UN Commission of Inquiry examining Israel’s system of oppression as a whole, told the Coalition for the ICC.
“A form of secondary victimization”
The aim of the sanctions is to “target a few with the aim of impacting the whole,” Agnès Callamard, the head of Amnesty International, told the Coalition for the ICC.
“The consequences have been immediate, and the impact on the daily lives of those designated, and their families … has been striking,” the coalition states in its report.
The documentation and advocacy work of the Palestinian human rights groups placed under sanctions – Al-Haq, Addameer, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights – has been profoundly disrupted.
They are “unable to receive funds or to process payments such as salaries, rent or other office expenses essential to their operations,” the report states.
Senior staff members with dual nationalities have had to resign and the organizations lost significant amounts of funding from not only the US, but also European donors.
Their websites, email lists, social media accounts and other digital services were shut down, resulting in the “permanent deletion of hundreds, if not thousands, of videos, documentaries and victim testimonies about violations in Palestine.”
The sanctions follow years of persecution and Israeli attacks that destroyed the offices of Al Mezan and PCHR, which are based in Gaza. Several PCHR employees and their family members were killed in Israeli attacks.
For human rights defenders in Gaza, access to their salaries is “a matter of survival” for them and their families, as the coalition states in its report.
Israel has denied international human rights organizations, investigators and journalists access to Gaza, where more than 260 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 2023, making the work of the targeted Palestinian groups all the more essential.
The organizations are moreover a link between victims and the International Criminal Court, and their criminalization is “a form of secondary victimization” for victims of grave abuses who are left wondering where to turn to, according to Margaret Sattherthwaite, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers.
The sanctions have shaken civil society working on a range of issues and organizations in the US who “face exposure to criminal liability for routine acts” in their work towards justice and accountability, should they be viewed as providing “material support” to designated individuals and groups, the Coalition for the ICC states in its report.
The designated Palestinian groups have been outcast from networks and coalitions based in the US. Some US nationals even “took themselves off group chats and completely stopped engaging with designated individuals,” the coalition adds.
Groups based outside the US have also taken “steps to prevent their US staff from working with the designated organizations and individuals,” leaving their Palestinian human rights colleagues feeling abandoned and isolated.
“Financial warfare”
The US sanctions regime – the weaponization of American dominance over the international financial system as a “new form of financial warfare,” as the lawyer Gavin Sullivan told the Coalition for the ICC – came out of the so-called War on Terror in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks.
Dependence on networks linked to the US compels financial institutions in other countries to overly comply with the sanctions and cut “services to designated persons, even when domestic law does not mandate the termination of services,” the coalition explains in its report.
Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, said that not only were his bank accounts in the UK and Malaysia frozen, but his ex-wife’s bank account was “frozen when he tried to transfer money to her for their children,” the report states.
Family members of sanctioned court officials have also had US visas revoked and their Google, Apple and Amazon accounts canceled, with corporate monopolies instrumentalized “as proxy enforcement arms for sanctions,” according to the Coalition for the ICC.
The banks of the sanctioned Palestinian groups closed their accounts and they have been prevented “from transacting in any currency, even in the euro, Jordanian dinar or Israeli shekel.”
European banks “choose over-compliance,” violating the law by refusing to open a bank account for legal EU residents, who are guaranteed the right to a basic account.
The Trump administration has threatened to sanction the court itself if it doesn’t stop the investigation of Israeli and US nationals and amend the Rome Statute so the court can no longer prosecute nationals of non-state parties.
If the US makes good on its threat, it would immediately impact the ICC’s banking systems and financial transactions. It would affect all their investigations across all situations and the ability of the ICC Trust Fund for Victims to deliver reparations.
Already, the designations have “created a wave of fear among actors working on justice and accountability,” the Coalition for the ICC states.
For Nicolas Guillou, a French ICC judge, the greatest risk posed by the sanctions lies in this fear: “If judges are afraid to judge, prosecutors are afraid to prosecute and lawyers are afraid to defend, we are no longer in a state governed by the rule of law.”
This is the intangible, invisible impact, the coalition states, whether it be organizations not providing evidence or “friend of the court” briefs, to “senior experts not applying to be a judge or UN independent expert” out of fear of being criminalized.
“No other choice”
Giving in to pressure by Israel and its powerful allies to drop the Palestine file would irreversibly compromise the independence and impartiality of what is meant to be a court of last resort for the world’s most vulnerable victims.
“It should be the end [of the court], because then you are an instrument using the sword of justice solely against the enemies of the powerful,” Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, is quoted as saying in the report.
It would also represent a major defeat of the rule of law in favor of a world in which might makes right.
“The sanctions are imposed in the same manner as when medieval criminal thugs kidnapped judges, burnt court houses and killed witnesses,” Sidoti, the Australian expert, told the Coalition for the ICC.
The first wave of sanctions on ICC judges targeted four women from countries with marginal power relative to the countries of the judges who were initially spared, though sanctions have also targeted nationals of key US allies, including Canada and the UK.
The coalition notes in its report that “beyond the ICC and those cooperating with it, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions against national judges, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and advocacy groups and movements under separate executive orders.”
Those orders are issued without any judicial oversight and designated individuals have “few, or no, due process protections.” Nor do they receive prior notice to their assets being frozen or access to the classified information used to support their designation.
“These actions directly violate the sovereignty of individual states,” the independence of their judiciaries and the rights of their citizens, the coalition adds.
The sanctions have “the potential to become a considerable threat to the rule of law worldwide and in Europe,” Guillou, the French judge at the ICC, states in the report.
Incidentally, the US company Expedia canceled a hotel reservation Guillou had made in Europe, citing the sanctions. Expedia was named in a recent report by the UN Human Rights Council as one of more than 150 companies with ties to Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.
A corporate accountability project of the American Friends Service Committee states that Expedia’s listings in settlements inherently discriminate against Palestinians, who are unable to access those properties. Some listings moreover “raise concerns of pillage, as the company is charging a commission on their booking without the freely given consent of the legal landowners.”
While denying services to sanctioned ICC officials like Guillou, companies like Expedia are profiting from violations of the international law that those sanctioned officials are working to uphold.
But despite everything they are up against, Palestinians human rights defenders vow to seek justice through whatever means necessary.
Palestinian human rights organizations tried to work with the Israeli justice system for decades, Issam Younis, director of Al Mezan, said during the launch of the Coalition for the ICC report in The Hague.
“It’s mission impossible,” Younis said of engaging with the Israeli system, leaving Palestinians victims wondering where to turn to. A window of opportunity was opened when Palestine was recognized as a UN member state and became a state party to the ICC.
“The minute that we decided to go there, we were subjected to unprecedented smear campaigns to delegitimize us and defund our organizations,” Younis said of Palestinian groups engaged with the court.
“We will never give up,” Younis added. “There is no other choice.”
Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada. She worked for Al-Haq between 2004 and 2006.
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