The case does not begin in The Hague.It begins in a bombed street in Gaza, where a lawyer kneels to write down a name before the body is buried. It begins with a prison visit, where a detainee cannot yet say what has been done to her body. It begins in a fieldworker’s notebook, a scar photographed, a testimony taken in whispers, a file carried out of a place where everyone knows that evidence itself is dangerous.Long before the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants in November 2024 against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, Palestinian lawyers and human rights organisations had already built the archive of evidence the world is now being asked to confront.They documented torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, attacks on hospitals, the killing of children and the destruction of entire families. They did this for years while being smeared, raided, surveilled, closed by military order, labelled “terrorists”, threatened, exiled and ignored.The people trying to make the law speak have had to do so while under attack themselves.Tahseen Elayyan of Al-Haq describes the process. His organisation, one of the oldest Palestinian human rights groups, gathers testimony directly from victims and witnesses, preserves whatever evidence can be sav …
