Legal analysis highlights systemic barriers facing International Criminal Court deterrence in Palestine, indicating enhanced complementarity is necessary to pursue victim accountability.
Despite persistent efforts by the international community, represented by the United Nations and international human rights organisations, to alleviate the setbacks that have arisen in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and provide humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians, the resurgence of armed conflict in Gaza in 2023 highlighted the ineffectiveness of previous attempts. This article posits that it is incumbent upon the international community to engage in a comprehensive re-evaluation of the role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Palestinian issue. This inquiry necessarily extends across restorative justice, deterrence theory and complementarity, as these aspects reflect the core functions of the ICC and are essentially mutually reinforcing. Therefore, this paper adopts a multi-dimensional analytical framework. It provides a detailed analysis of the challenges confronted by the ICC in the context of the Palestinian issue. The article seeks to answer what the different prospects are for the deterrent effect and the complementarity role of the ICC in pursuing justice for the victims of the Israel–Palestine conflict. It argues that enhancing the complementarity with the ICC is a necessary approach to finding new possibilities and solutions for the pursuit of justice, and conducts an in-depth discussion on this issue.
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Yang et al. (2026) studied this question.
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