WHEN THIS SERIES BEGAN, we said we would stand in the space almost no one is willing to occupy: the space where the same law is applied to both parties, where neither side’s crimes excuse the other’s, and where the evidence is followed wherever it leads. Part I did that for the conduct — what happened on 7 October, and what happened in the response. Part II did it for the causes — the long history that produced the day, and the longer denial that kept the wound open. This is the part where the standard is cashed in.
A verdict is not an opinion. It is what an authority empowered to judge concludes once the evidence has been heard. So this section does not tell you what I have decided. It tells you what the institutions built to make these judgements have found. I am an investigator setting out their findings, not a judge handing down my own — and that distinction is precisely the one the discourse refuses to make, between what a person feels about this war and what the bodies charged with applying international law have actually ruled.
These institutions are imperfect, and they operate under political pressure that has only intensified. But this is the same legal order that tried the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg and put Slobodan Milošević in the dock at The Hague — and no one called it illegitimate then. The alternative to imperfect shared law, rejecting every body whose findings are inconvenient, is not neutrality. It is a world with nothing left in it but unchecked power.
Here is what they have found.
On 7 October, Hamas and the armed groups that crossed the fence with it committed war crimes. No one applying the law honestly disputes this, and Part I set it out in detail: the deliberate killing of civilians, the taking of more than two hundred hostages, the murder of captives in captivity. Hostage-taking is prohibited without exception under the Fourth Geneva Convention.¹ The deliberate targeting of civilians is among the gravest breaches the law recognises. These are not allegations awaiting a tribunal to confirm them; they are established facts of conduct, and we named them as such when we wrote about the day itself.
The International Criminal Court agreed. In 2024 its prosecutor sought arrest warrants against three Hamas leaders — Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh — for extermination, murder, hostage-taking, rape and other crimes committed on and after 7 October.² Not one of those warrants will ever be served. Haniyeh was killed in Tehran in July 2024; Sinwar in Gaza three months later; and Deif’s warrant, the last to stand, was withdrawn in 2025 once the Court accepted that he too was dead.³ Every Hamas figure the Court named for 7 October is now in a grave. State that plainly, because it bears on everything that follows: the men most responsible for the atrocities of that morning are beyond the reach of any court — not through impunity, but through death.
The response is where the law’s machinery is still running, and where its findings are gravest. On 16 September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. The Commission found that four of the five acts defined in the Genocide Convention had been carried out: killing members of the group; causing them serious bodily and mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction; and imposing measures intended to prevent births.⁴ It is the most serious finding an international body can make, and a United Nations commission has made it. In June 2026 the same Commission returned with a narrower and more terrible report, concluding that Israel had deliberately targeted Palestinian children — and that the killing of children had continued after the October ceasefire was meant to have stopped it.⁵
That finding does not stand alone. But neither is it yet the settled conclusion of every relevant body, and honesty requires saying so. The International Court of Justice — the court hearing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel — has so far ruled only that the Palestinians hold a plausible right to be protected from genocide, enough to impose binding provisional measures while the case proceeds. It has not ruled on the merits, and on its own timetable it will not for years.⁶ The International Criminal Court, for its part, issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Benjamin Netanyahu and his then defence minister, Yoav Gallant — but for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not genocide. The Court found reasonable grounds to believe the two men bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, and for the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts.⁷ The Commission of Inquiry has since called for the charge of genocide to be added.⁸ So the picture, stated precisely, is this: one United Nations commission has found genocide and asked that it be charged; the world’s permanent criminal court has charged the crimes one rung below it; and the world’s highest court has found the question plausible enough to try, and is years from answering it. We rest on that picture.
On the causes, the law had already spoken before this war began. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice delivered its advisory opinion on the occupation itself: Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible; its settlements breach international law and must be dismantled; the settlers must be evacuated; reparation is owed.⁹ The settlements have been illegal since the occupation began in 1967 — the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power from transferring its own population into the territory it holds, in plain words, and legal authorities have said so for decades.¹⁰ The siege of Gaza was unlawful before a single fighter crossed the fence. None of this is law written to fit this war. It is old law that this war did not pause.
Set these findings beside one another and a pattern appears that is not symmetry. The men who carried out the atrocities of 7 October are dead, their warrants extinguished with them. The man who directed the response is alive, in office, and carries an outstanding warrant from the International Criminal Court — and through all of it has run a single political career. Part II traced Benjamin Netanyahu as the constant across the better part of three decades, during which the Israeli centre of gravity moved steadily toward a politics that treats Palestinian statehood as a threat to be managed and Palestinian life as a cost to be absorbed. He did not author the conflict; no one person did. What makes him central is not authorship but continuity: his career maps onto the period in which Israel’s most expansionist and openly supremacist currents moved from the margins to the governing core, and he is the longest-serving carrier of that shift. But he is the figure who appears in every chapter of its worsening, and he is the one still standing when the charges are read.
This is the part of the discourse that breaks people, so let me be exact about it. To apply the same law to both parties is not to claim the parties are the same. Crimes were committed on both sides; they are not equal — not in scale, not in character, not in consequence — and pretending otherwise to appear balanced would be its own dishonesty. One side committed a massacre and took hostages across a single catastrophic morning. The other has been found by a United Nations commission to have committed genocide across two years, while holding the territory, the army, the borders, the airspace, and the protection of the most powerful state on earth. The same standard, applied honestly, does not return a balanced finding. It returns this one. And the reckoning it implies — if a reckoning ever comes — will not fall equally on both.
What that reckoning would require, and why it has not arrived, is the subject of what follows.
What Accountability Would Actually Look Like
The findings exist. That is the strange feature of this war: the law has not been silent, and it has not been vague. A United Nations commission has found genocide. The world’s permanent criminal court has issued arrest warrants against a sitting prime minister and his defence minister. The world’s highest court has ordered binding measures while it hears the genocide case. The occupation itself has been ruled unlawful. So the question this part has to answer is not what the law says. It is why almost none of it has been enforced.
Accountability is not the finding. It is what is meant to follow it — the arrest, the trial, the reparation, the change in conduct that a judgement is supposed to compel. And it is exactly here, in the distance between what the institutions have ruled and what has been done about it, that the machinery built to prevent another Gaza shows how little of it actually turns.
Start with the warrants. An arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court is not a request. Every one of the more than 120 states bound by the Rome Statute is legally obliged to arrest a wanted person who sets foot on its soil. On paper, that makes most of the planet closed to Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. In practice, the obligation has fractured along political lines: a long list of states — Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and others — have said they would honour the warrant, while Argentina, Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania have said they would not, and France and Italy have invented a head-of-state immunity the Court has already rejected.¹¹ The warrant is real. Its geography is negotiable, and it shifts with every election.
Hungary is the clearest illustration. In April 2025, as he welcomed Netanyahu to Budapest in open defiance of his own country’s legal duty to arrest him, Viktor Orbán announced that Hungary would leave the Court altogether. A year later Orbán was gone, beaten in a landslide, and the new government did the opposite: in May 2026 the Hungarian parliament voted to repeal the withdrawal and keep the country inside the Statute, its prime minister stating plainly that an ICC fugitive who entered Hungary would be arrested.¹² A wanted man now has to read the world one election at a time. Netanyahu skipped the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2026 rather than risk arrest in Switzerland. This is what a warrant does even when it is never served: it shrinks the world of the man it names. It is not nothing. It is also not justice.
The International Court of Justice is a different instrument, and it is important to be honest about what it can and cannot do. The case South Africa brought is against the state of Israel, not against any individual. The Court can find a state responsible for genocide; it can order it to stop, and to make reparation. It cannot imprison anyone. And it moves at the pace of a glacier. As things stand it has ruled only that the Palestinians hold a plausible right to be protected from genocide — enough to impose three binding sets of provisional measures, which Israel has not obeyed. On the merits it has not ruled at all. Israel filed its written defence in March 2026; the Court’s own timetable does not require South Africa’s reply until November 2027 and Israel’s response to that until May 2029.¹³ A judgement on whether genocide occurred is, on the optimistic reading, the back half of the decade away. The provisional measures are binding in law and unenforced in fact, because enforcement of a World Court order runs through the Security Council — and that is where the whole machine stops.
It stops because of one state. The United States has used its Security Council veto again and again to block demands for a ceasefire, and when it finally let a resolution pass, it was the resolution that put an American board in charge of Gaza. That is the visible half of the shield. The less visible half is the war Washington has opened on the courts themselves. In February 2025 the President signed an executive order placing sanctions on the International Criminal Court; the administration went on to sanction the Court’s judges and prosecutors and the United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories — punishing, by name, the officials whose job is to apply the law.¹⁴ It is worth pausing on how far outside the ordinary this is. A permanent member of the Security Council, sworn to uphold the international legal order, is sanctioning the judges of the world’s criminal court to stop them judging its ally. The judges have sued. The point of the exercise is not subtle: the obstacle to accountability is not that the law is unclear. It is that the enforcement chain runs through the one government that has decided to break it.
Europe is the place where the contradiction is sharpest. In September 2025 a run of Western states — the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia and others — recognised the state of Palestine, and the General Assembly endorsed a declaration committing its signatories to irreversible steps toward two states.¹⁵ Germany, which had lined up to defend Israel at the ICJ, quietly withdrew from the case.¹⁶ The rhetoric moved. What did not move at the same speed were the arms shipments, the trade agreements and the port access that keep the war machine supplied. A continent can recognise a Palestinian state on Monday and clear a weapons transfer on Tuesday, and several did. I read that gap as the truest measure of where Europe actually stands: far enough to make the gesture, not yet far enough to pay for it. National courts have begun to fill some of the space — universal-jurisdiction complaints have been filed against Israeli soldiers and officials in several countries — but those cases rarely reach trial, generally require the suspect to be physically present, and collapse easily under political pressure. They are a pressure, not a remedy.
And while the courts are blocked, a settlement is being built that is structured to keep them blocked. In November 2025 the Security Council passed Resolution 2803, handing the administration of Gaza to a “Board of Peace” chaired by Donald Trump, with an international force and a mandate running to the end of 2027.¹⁷ Beneath the board sits a committee of Palestinian technocrats answering to a high representative, and above it all sits the vision its architects describe openly: Jared Kushner’s “New Gaza” of resorts and business hubs, built on a strip where Israel still holds roughly two-thirds of the ground along a line it will not retreat behind. The trusteeship governs reconstruction while the people whose territory it is have no seat at its head. Netanyahu has one. The man under an ICC warrant for the conduct of the war sits on the body now administering its aftermath.
How far this is meant to go became clearer in late June 2026, when the Guardian obtained a draft resolution — unsigned, denied by the board, but on its face revealing — that would grant the board, its officials, its international force and its contractors sweeping immunity from “any arrest, detention or legal proceedings in the courts or other entities in Gaza,” with the chair, Trump, empowered to waive it; a separate clause would hand the board public premises “free of charge,” and another would let it judge for itself any claim for death, injury or property brought against it.¹⁸ The board says no such framework is operative, and the document may never be signed in that form. But the lawyers who reviewed it described what it attempts plainly enough — a legal system answerable to no one outside itself, with the power to take Palestinian property and immunity from the consequences. Mark this as interpretation, because the draft is not yet law: a trusteeship that writes its own exemption from accountability before it has built a single building is not ending the logic of the war. It is administering its continuation.
There is a simpler way to see why external mechanisms matter, and it is found inside Israel’s own courts. The state has had every chance to hold itself to account, and we can read its answer in two cases. At Sde Teiman, where detainees were tortured, the charges against the five reservists accused of sodomising a Palestinian prisoner were dismissed in March 2026 — partly because the prosecution could not proceed, partly because the prisoner had been released back into Gaza and could not testify, and the prime minister called the whole investigation a “blood libel.”¹⁹ Meanwhile the officer who exposed the abuse, the military’s own former chief prosecutor, was dismissed from the army and stripped of her pension in May 2026, and as of then had not been charged with anything at all.²⁰ The man accused of the torture walks free; the lawyer who reported it is destroyed. This is not an accident of two cases. Israeli human-rights organisations record that of the hundreds of complaints of detainee abuse since October 2023, indictments have been brought in a mere handful, and that well over nine in ten investigations into ideologically motivated offences by Israelis against Palestinians end with no charge at all.²¹ A system that produces those numbers has rendered its verdict on its own willingness to deliver justice. That verdict is the case for an external one.
So this is where accountability actually stands. The findings are in and the machinery to act on them exists — and almost every part of it has been jammed, vetoed, sanctioned, slowed to a crawl, or quietly replaced by a body designed to answer to no court at all. None of that unmakes the findings. What it does is force a harder question onto the next part of this series. If the law cannot compel a just outcome, what outcome is even still available — and what would it cost to reach it?
The Settlement Options, Honestly Assessed
There are, in the end, only three shapes a permanent settlement can take. Two peoples can divide the land between two states. They can share a single state as equal citizens. Or they can build something between those poles — a confederation, two states under one roof. Everything written about the future of this conflict for the past fifty years is a variation on one of those three. What honesty requires is to assess each not against what we would wish, but against the ground as it actually is in 2026 — a ground on which a foreign board now governs Gaza, Israel holds the larger part of it behind a line it will not cross, and the settlements have eaten most of the territory the first option depends on.
The two-state solution is the one almost the entire world still endorses, and the one furthest from being possible. Its requirements have not changed in decades: a Palestinian state on the territory occupied in 1967, with Jerusalem shared as a capital for both peoples; the settlements addressed, whether by withdrawal or by some negotiated status under Palestinian sovereignty; the right of return confronted seriously rather than waved away or treated as absolute; and security guarantees binding on both sides, not on the weaker one alone. In September 2025 a majority of the world’s states put their names to a declaration committing them to exactly this, in language promising irreversible steps toward two states, and a run of Western governments recognised Palestine outright. That was the high-water mark of two-state diplomacy. It arrived at the precise moment the thing it described was being foreclosed on the ground.
Look at what stands in the way. Some 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, woven through the territory a Palestinian state would need to be built on.²² The Israeli prime minister states plainly and repeatedly that there will never be a Palestinian state, and he has built a politics in which saying otherwise ends careers. And in Gaza, the supposed core of the future state, an American board governs and an Israeli army holds two-thirds of the ground.²³ This is the contradiction at the heart of the present moment: more governments recognise Palestine than at any time in history, and the physical basis for a Palestinian state has never been thinner. Recognition is a statement about the world as it ought to be. The map is a statement about the world as it is being made. Right now the second is winning.
The one-state solution begins from that map and draws the opposite conclusion: if the land cannot be divided, then the people on it must be made equal within it — one state, between the river and the sea, with one citizenship and one vote per person. Its honesty is that it describes a single territory already controlled by a single power, and asks only that the people living under that power have equal rights. Its impossibility is political, and it runs in both directions. For most Israeli Jews, a single state with equal citizenship means the end of a Jewish-majority state, which is the entire purpose of Zionism as they understand it; they will not vote for their own dissolution. For the Palestinian national movement, it means surrendering the dream of independence for the status of a minority — or eventual majority — inside the state of those who dispossessed them. The comparison reached for here is South Africa, and it is worth being careful with it. The end of apartheid produced one state with equal votes, but it came after a negotiated transition led by movements on both sides that chose it. There is no such negotiation here, no leadership on either side proposing it, and no outside power pressing for it. The analogy describes a destination. It does not supply a road.
That leaves the middle option, the one discussed least and dismissed fastest: a confederation, two sovereign states sharing the land through open borders, joint institutions, and freedom of movement and residence across both — the model sketched by initiatives such as Two States, One Homeland, and built, elsewhere, into arrangements from Belgium to Northern Ireland.²⁴ Its appeal is that it answers the objection that sinks two-state — that the land cannot in practice be cut cleanly into two — without demanding that either people give up its national identity, as one-state does. Its weakness is that it asks for more trust, not less. Open borders and shared sovereignty between two nations that do not yet trust each other to keep a ceasefire is a structure built on the very thing the conflict has destroyed. It may be the least impossible settlement on paper. On the ground it currently has no constituency at all.
So weigh them honestly and the conclusion is uncomfortable. Each of the three settlements is, for now, foreclosed — two-state by the facts on the ground, one-state by the politics of both peoples, confederation by the absence of trust to build it on. And here is the part no honest account can skip: while all three remain blocked, a fourth thing is quietly becoming the settlement by default. Not a chosen outcome but a drifting one — Gaza administered indefinitely by an external board with no political horizon written into its mandate, the West Bank carved by settlement into pieces too small to govern, and the whole question of Palestinian statehood deferred to a “credible pathway” that recedes as you walk toward it. No one will sign this settlement, because no one has to. It is being built without anyone’s signature. That is the outcome the present trajectory delivers if nothing changes — and it is the strongest argument for specifying, plainly, what an honest settlement would actually require.
What an Honest Settlement Requires
Whatever shape a settlement finally takes — two states, one state, or something between — it has to satisfy a set of conditions that do not depend on the shape. These are the things any durable peace must contain, because they are the things whose absence wrecked every previous attempt. They are not a balanced ledger of equal concessions. Some of them ask both peoples to accept a truth they have resisted. Most of the actions they require fall on the party that holds the territory and built the facts, because that is the party in a position to undo them. An honest account says both of those things at once, and does not pretend the second is a matter of symmetry.
It begins with the truth about how this started. Part II set out the Nakba as what it was: the expulsion and flight of some three-quarters of a million Palestinians in 1948, and the destruction of the society they were driven from.²⁵ No settlement will hold that is built on the denial of that event, because a people will not accept a peace that requires them first to agree they were never wronged. Recognition of the Nakba as historical fact — not as one narrative among others, not as a regrettable side-effect, but as a founding injustice — is the floor. It costs Israel nothing but the comfort of the story it tells itself, and it buys the one thing on which reconciliation can be built: an agreed account of what happened.
The same honesty runs the other way, and this is where many who take the Palestinian side go quiet. Israeli security fear is real. It is not a public-relations invention to excuse the occupation — though it has been used as one, including to justify wars Israel itself launched, from Suez to Lebanon. Its deepest source is a European crime: the Holocaust was carried out by Europe, not by the people of Palestine, who were then made to pay for it. But the fear did not stay abstract. It was renewed by the experience of attack on civilians — the suicide bombings, the rockets, and most recently the morning of 7 October, which showed every Israeli that the promise the state was founded to keep, that Jews would never again be unprotected, could still be broken in an afternoon. A settlement that treats that fear as illegitimate will fail as surely as one that denies the Nakba. The Palestinian national movement does not have to share the fear, and owes no apology for a genocide it did not commit. It has only to take the fear seriously enough to build guarantees against it — which is a different thing from accepting the occupation that fear has been used to justify.
Then the hardest of the concrete questions: the right of return. Millions of Palestinians hold refugee status inherited from 1948, and a United Nations resolution affirmed a right of return as early as that year.²⁶ Israelis hear in that right the demographic end of their state, and say so. Palestinians hear in its denial the erasure of the central wrong done to them, and say so. Both are describing something real. An honest settlement neither pretends the right does not exist nor pretends every refugee will walk back into a village that is now an Israeli town. It addresses the right seriously — through some combination of return, compensation, resettlement with dignity, and, above all, the formal acknowledgment that the right was real and the loss was wrong. What cannot survive contact with peace is the present arrangement, in which the claim is neither honoured nor honestly refused, only deferred forever.
The settlers are the question two states was meant to answer and never did. Some 700,000 Israelis now live beyond the 1967 line, and no honest settlement can leave their status blank. The options are narrow and each is hard: withdrawal from the settlements incompatible with a contiguous Palestinian state; the removal — not a word anyone uses lightly — of settlers who will not live under Palestinian sovereignty; or the offer, to those who will, of residence or citizenship in a Palestinian state, the precise counterpart of the Arab citizens who live inside Israel today. What cannot continue is the present course, on which the settlements grow every year for the express purpose of making the question unanswerable.
Jerusalem is claimed by both peoples as a capital, and an honest settlement gives it to both — a shared city, not an undivided one held by one people and administered over the heads of the other. Every alternative has been tried, and together they have produced the city as it now is: contested, policed, and partitioned by force rather than agreement.
None of this can rest on the trust of the parties, because the parties do not trust each other and have earned the distrust. Every element of a settlement — Israel’s security, Palestine’s sovereignty, the borders, the holy places — will need international guarantees with weight behind them: not the kind that evaporates at the first veto, but binding commitments backed by states willing to enforce them on whichever side breaks them. That is a tall order in a system whose most powerful guarantor has spent two years shielding one party from the law. But a settlement without external backing lasts exactly until one side decides it is strong enough to ignore it.
And it has to be built on accountability, not amnesty. Here Section 2 returns. A peace that buys quiet by burying the crimes — a blanket pardon for everyone who ordered or carried out what the courts have charged — will not hold, because the unaccounted wrong does not vanish; it waits. The model usually offered here is South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and it deserves the same honesty as everything else: it traded some justice for truth, granted amnesties that many victims found unbearable, and left real grievances unresolved.²⁷ It is an imperfect template. But its central insight holds — that a society cannot reconcile around a lie, and that the precondition for moving forward is an agreed, public, documented account of what was done and by whom. Truth first. Accountability where the evidence requires it. Amnesty, if at all, only as something granted by those who were wronged, never imposed over them.
Set out plainly, these conditions read like an inventory of everything currently absent. That is the point of setting them out. They are a measure — the standard against which any proposed settlement can be judged, including the one now taking shape in Gaza: the Trump-chaired Board of Peace administering the territory under UN Resolution 2803, with no Palestinian state, no shared Jerusalem, no reckoning, and no return written into it. Measured against these conditions, it is not a settlement at all. It resolves nothing; it manages a conflict left unresolved. The question the final part of this series has to answer is the hardest one: what would actually have to change — in Washington, in Europe, in the Arab capitals, and in Israeli and Palestinian politics — for any honest settlement to become possible.
What It Will Take
It is one thing to set out the conditions of an honest settlement and another to say what would move the world from where it is to where those conditions could be met. This is the part where it is tempting to end on hope, and I am not going to. The honest answer to what it will take is a list of things that have mostly not happened, several of which show no sign of happening, and one of which matters more than all the others combined.
Start with that one. Nothing changes without the United States. That is not a slogan; it is the structure of the thing. America arms Israel, shields it at the Security Council, sanctions the courts that would judge it, and now chairs the board that governs Gaza. Every lever that could compel a different outcome runs through Washington — which means the single most important variable in any honest settlement is a change in American policy, and that is precisely the variable least in prospect. The administration holding those levers is the one that built the Board of Peace. A shift would require either a different administration or a different posture from this one, and neither is on the horizon. There is no softening this: the indispensable condition is also the absent one. Much of the rest of this section is, in truth, an account of how the world might generate enough pressure to move the one actor that has decided not to move.
Europe is where that pressure is most plausible and most contradicted by itself. The September 2025 recognitions showed that the political cost of backing Israel without conditions has risen; governments that would not have recognised Palestine five years ago did so. But recognition is the cheap part. The test Europe has not passed is the expensive one — arms, trade, and the association agreements that bind its economy to Israel’s. A Europe that recognises Palestine on Monday and licenses weapons on Tuesday has not yet decided which of those acts it means. If it ever brings its arms and its trade into line with its stated values, and with the law it claims to uphold, it becomes the counterweight to Washington that no other bloc can be. That is a real possibility. It is not yet a fact.
The Arab states hold a card they have only recently begun to play. Saudi Arabia has made normalisation with Israel conditional on a credible and irreversible path to Palestinian statehood and an end to the war, and through 2026 it has held that line rather than softening it.²⁸ That is the most concrete leverage any state outside the West possesses, because normalisation is the prize Israel wants most. But leverage works only if it is held when it is tested, and the history of Arab engagement is largely a history of symbolic positions abandoned under pressure or quietly traded away. Whether the Saudi condition proves a turning point or another gesture depends entirely on whether it survives the first serious offer to buy it off.
Then the hardest variable of all, because it cannot be supplied from outside: leadership on both sides willing to make a settlement, which at present exists on neither. Israel goes to elections in 2026, but no major bloc offers a vision of Palestinian statehood; the contest runs between parties that reject it outright and parties that would rather not discuss it.²⁹ On the Palestinian side the crisis is different and no smaller — a Palestinian Authority that has held no national election since 2006, led by a man in his ninetieth year with little standing among the people he claims to speak for, and a Gaza whose representation is the very question the war was fought over.³⁰ A settlement needs partners who can sign for their peoples and make it hold. Neither people has one now. That is not a problem to be solved last; it is among the first things that would have to change, and the one outside powers can do least to force.
Some of the pressure is already being built from below, and it is the part of this account with the most movement in it. The shift in public opinion across the West, the boycott and divestment campaigns, the dockworkers refusing to load weapons, the lawyers filing universal-jurisdiction cases, the states coordinating to enforce the courts’ rulings — none of this has yet changed the policy of the powerful, but together it is what raised the cost of unconditional support enough to produce the recognitions in the first place. Movements do not deliver settlements. What they do is change what is politically survivable for the governments that can, and that work is under way. It is slow, and it is the most honest source of optimism on offer.
And when the political channels are blocked — vetoed, sanctioned, captured — the courts remain the one venue that does not need the consent of the powerful to proceed. They move slowly, they cannot enforce their own orders, and they are under direct attack for the work they have already done. But the genocide case will still be before the International Court of Justice long after the present administrations are gone; the warrants do not expire; the findings stand on the record. The law is not a fast remedy and it is not a sufficient one. It is, however, the part of this that cannot simply be vetoed away — which is precisely why it is being attacked so hard.
Add it together and the picture is neither hopeless nor hopeful; it is honest. The one actor who could change everything will not. The blocs that could pressure him have not yet paid the price to do so. The leaders who would have to sign do not exist. And beneath all of it a slow movement is raising the cost of the status quo by increments, with no guarantee it will ever be enough. None of this is fixed. Administrations fall, coalitions break, opinion moves faster than anyone predicts, and wars produce shocks that redraw what was thought settled. That is what it will take: not a single breakthrough but the alignment of several improbable things, no one of which is impossible.
What This Series Was For
When this began, we said it would not take a side so much as hold a standard: one law, applied to both parties, the evidence followed wherever it led. Three parts on, it is worth saying plainly what that produced — because the standard was the whole point, and the result is the proof of it.
Part I established the conduct. Hamas and the armed groups that crossed with it committed war crimes on 7 October, and we said so without qualification; Israel’s response, we showed, went far beyond anything the law of war allows. Part II established the causes — that the day had a history, that the history had a shape, and that the shape was an occupation and a denial of peoplehood the world had agreed for decades to manage rather than end. Part III has set out what the institutions built to judge these things have concluded: a genocide finding, arrest warrants against a sitting prime minister, an occupation ruled unlawful — and an accountability system jammed at every turn by the one power determined to break it, organised now around a settlement that settles nothing.
None of that was reached by deciding in advance who deserved sympathy. It was reached by refusing to. That refusal is the thing almost no one writing about this war has been willing to attempt, and it is why so much of what is written about it is worthless — it begins with the conclusion and recruits the evidence to fit. We began with the evidence and let it carry us to a conclusion that is not balanced, because the facts are not balanced: one side committed a massacre, the other a response a United Nations commission has found to be genocide, and the same law that names the first names the second.
Through all three parts one figure recurs, and it is not an accident of emphasis. Benjamin Netanyahu is the constant across the long worsening this series traced — the politician who, as Part II set out, did more than any other to carry a once-marginal Jewish-supremacist politics into the heart of Israeli government and to make hostility to Palestinian statehood its governing common sense, and who survived every catastrophe that politics produced, including the one that opened this war. He now sits, under an outstanding warrant for the conduct of that war, on the board that governs what is left of Gaza. The man most identified with building the conditions is being handed the writing of their aftermath. Whether he is permitted to write that history is, in the end, a question about whether anything in this series is allowed to matter.
So this is what the evidence establishes. Crimes were committed on 7 October. Graver crimes were committed in the response — and the gravest of them, in the finding of the United Nations commission charged with examining it, is genocide. The occupation that produced both was unlawful before either began. The institutions of international law have said as much, in the measured language of findings and warrants and orders; the most powerful state on earth has spent two years making sure none of it is enforced. The law has done its part. What it requires now is enforcement — the same rule reaching everyone the evidence names, the powerful no less than the weak. That is the one thing the powerful have not allowed, because they are the ones it would reach. That was the standard this series set out to hold. The record shows where holding it leads.
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Image: Peace Palace, The Hague (Bain News Service, 1913), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain.
James S. Coates writes about geopolitics, international law, and the decline of civilisational accountability. His books include A Signal Through Time, The Threshold, The Road to Khurasan, the memoir God and Country (published under pen name Will Prentiss) and his forthcoming Neither Gods Nor Monsters. He publishes regularly on Fireline Press and The Signal Dispatch, and his academic work appears on PhilPapers. He lives in the UK, with his family and dog who has no interest in any of this.
© 2026 James S. Coates All Rights Reserved. Fireline Press · fireline.press
Endnotes
¹ Geneva Convention IV, Article 34: “The taking of hostages is prohibited.”
² Office of the Prosecutor, International Criminal Court, statement on applications for arrest warrants in the situation in the State of Palestine, 20 May 2024 (seeking warrants for Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh alongside Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant).
³ Pre-Trial Chamber I issued a warrant for Deif on 21 November 2024, the applications against Sinwar and Haniyeh having lapsed on their deaths; the Deif warrant was withdrawn in 2025 after the Chamber accepted confirmation that he had been killed.
⁴ UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, finding that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, 16 September 2025; presented to the General Assembly on 28 October 2025.
⁵ UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, report on the targeting of children in Gaza, 23 June 2026.
⁶ International Court of Justice, Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Order on provisional measures, 26 January 2024.
⁷ International Criminal Court, Pre-Trial Chamber I, warrants of arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, 21 November 2024.
⁸ UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, recommendation that the charge of genocide be added to the existing warrants, October 2025.
⁹ International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024.
¹⁰ Geneva Convention IV, Article 49: an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
¹¹ Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and others have stated they would enforce the warrant; Argentina, Poland, the Czech Republic and Romania have indicated they would not; France and Italy asserted head-of-state immunity for Netanyahu, a position the Court rejected.
¹² Hungary moved to withdraw from the Rome Statute in April 2025, during Netanyahu’s visit; the Hungarian parliament voted 133–37 to repeal the withdrawal on 27 May 2026 under the government of Péter Magyar.
¹³ International Court of Justice, South Africa v. Israel: Israel’s counter-memorial was filed 12 March 2026; the Court’s order of 21 May 2026 set South Africa’s Reply for 22 November 2027 and Israel’s Rejoinder for 22 May 2029. South Africa’s submissions argued that self-defence is not a defence to genocide.
¹⁴ Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” 6 February 2025; subsequent United States sanctions on ICC judges and prosecutors and on the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Judges of the Court brought suit against the United States over the sanctions in 2026.
¹⁵ New York Declaration endorsed by the UN General Assembly, 12 September 2025 (142–10, 12 abstentions); recognition of the State of Palestine by the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia and others, September 2025.
¹⁶ Germany withdrew from its application to intervene on Israel’s behalf in South Africa v. Israel, March 2026.
¹⁷ UN Security Council Resolution 2803, 17 November 2025, establishing the Board of Peace and authorising an International Stabilisation Force, with a mandate to 31 December 2027.
¹⁸ Cate Brown and Aram Roston, “Trump’s Board of Peace plans to grant itself sweeping immunity, documents show,” The Guardian, 27 June 2026, reporting draft “Resolution No. 2026/3”; the Board of Peace disputed the characterisation, stating no such operative framework exists.
¹⁹ Charges against five reservists over the abuse of a detainee at Sde Teiman were dismissed on 12 March 2026.
²⁰ Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the former Military Advocate-General who disclosed the Sde Teiman abuse, was dismissed and stripped of her pension on 26 May 2026, having not been charged.
²¹ Figures from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and Yesh Din on the rate of non-prosecution of detainee abuse and of ideologically motivated offences by Israelis against Palestinians.
²² Estimates of the settler population of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in the region of 700,000; figures compiled by Israeli and international monitoring organisations.
²³ On the September 2025 recognitions and the New York Declaration, see note 15; on the Board of Peace and the extent of Israeli control in Gaza, see notes 17 and 18.
²⁴ The confederal model associated with the Two States, One Homeland initiative; comparative arrangements include the consociational frameworks of Belgium and the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland.
²⁵ On the scale of the 1948 expulsion and flight, see Part II; standard estimates place the number of Palestinians displaced at roughly three-quarters of a million.
²⁶ UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (III), 11 December 1948, paragraph 11, affirming a right of return for refugees wishing to return and live at peace with their neighbours; UNRWA registered-refugee figures now run to several million.
²⁷ South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established under the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act and operating from 1995, paired public truth-telling with a conditional amnesty process widely debated since.
²⁸ Saudi Arabia’s stated conditions for normalisation with Israel — a credible and irreversible path to Palestinian statehood and an end to the war — reaffirmed through 2026.
²⁹ Israeli legislative elections due in 2026 on the expiry of the Knesset’s term.
³⁰ The Palestinian Authority has held no national election since 2006; Mahmoud Abbas, elected to the presidency in 2005, has remained in office without a fresh mandate.