The same selectivity permeates international institutions. In the UN Security Council, the permanent members’ veto power means there are often no consequences for violations. In the Human Rights Council, the same power dynamics determine which crises will lead to concrete measures and which instead remain a matter of only reports and resolutions.
The ICC remains open, but it is isolated from the people who are gathering evidence and investigating. “We are witnessing the dismantling of accountability from the ground up,” warns Albanese.
For Al Mezan’s executive director, Issam Younis, returning to the UN’s Palais des Nations holds personal significance. In 1993, he came here as a student to tell member states that Palestinians were being tortured. More than three decades later, the torture continues, and his organization is being sanctioned for its work with the ICC.
“Governments no longer deny committing crimes,” he says. “In the past, they used to deny it. Now they’re proud to commit war crimes and genocide.”
The images of Israel’s crimes, the official statements, and the many eyewitness testimonies have failed to provide protection. Indeed, this impunity is evident in the confidence with which the crimes are displayed: those who commit them are well-aware that the images will circulate and that other states will stand idly by.
At the meeting in Geneva, a Palestinian lawyer recounted how detainees were forced to live for months inside a circle drawn on the floor, with their hands and feet chained, allowed to step outside it only for one-minute showers. “I’ve worked with prisoners for years. I’d never seen anything like it.” He described rapes, sexual violence, and amputations performed without anesthesia.
“Torture does to the individual what genocide does to a group,” Albanese says. Documenting these acts does not restore to the victims what has been taken from them, but it preserves the possibility of recognition and justice being done.
The lack of international action over Israel’s crimes in the West Bank has further consequences in the form of home demolitions, the seizing of land, and yet more attacks by settlers.
Take what happened on July 28 last year in Umm al-Khair, when a bulldozer from a nearby Israeli settlement entered the village and damaged Palestinian property. Teacher Awdah Hathaleen, an activist and father of three, filmed the scene. In the videos, Israeli settler Yinon Levi raises his gun and fires in his direction. Awdah is fatally shot in the chest.
The lack of international action over Israel’s crimes in the West Bank has further consequences in the form of home demolitions, the seizing of land, and more attacks by settlers.
Levi lives in the nearby settlement of Carmel. In 2024, he’d already been sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada for his role in violence against Palestinians. Yet the Trump administration revoked the US sanctions. After the killing, Levi was arrested and then quickly released again; Awdah’s body, however, was held for ten days, while conditions were imposed on the family regarding the funeral. “How can you release the murderer and hold onto the victim?” asks a representative of the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center.
For Haneen Hathaleen, Awdah’s niece, what has changed since October 7, 2023, is above all the license with which the Israeli settlers act. In previous years, she says, the violence was at least partially restrained by fear of international backlash. Now that seems to have vanished. “After everything that happened in Gaza, no one has called Israel to account for anything,” she says. “So whatever they do here, who would dare oppose them?”
The women of Umm al-Khair say that, since October 7, settlers have been coming almost every night. They enter the village, vandalize property, and prevent families from sleeping. “It’s not like it used to be,” they say. Fear is growing within the community that the increase in attacks will accelerate the displacement and annexation of their lands. The impunity for what is happening in Gaza is not separate from the West Bank: it strengthens the settlers’ conviction that they can act without resistance or consequences.