The Palestinian Authority has upped the ante in its lawfare campaign against Israel, announcing this summer the creation of a body built solely for channeling “evidence” of alleged Israeli crimes to the International Criminal Court and other legal forums, a Jerusalem-based watchdog group revealed this month.
The Palestinian National Monitoring Center will include some 65 employees who will scour Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip for evidence against Israel, P.A. Media Center Director Muhammad Abu al-Rub told Palestine TV on Aug. 16.
“The monitoring center will in the future be a central source for the work of the national team specializing in crimes within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court,” according to a July 29 announcement on the P.A.’s website.
The existence of the center was uncovered by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a research group that monitors the P.A. and Palestinian society.
Palestinians will be able to upload personal testimonies of rights violations they’ve allegedly witnessed to the center’s website. The testimonies will be collected and prepared for submission to international legal settings such as the ICC. “Cases, data and testimonies” will be turned into “human rights reports, legal files, research, maps, and reliable indicators” that will be used against Israel in international courts, the center’s website said.
PMW’s founder and director Itamar Marcus told JNS, “The fact that any one of three million Palestinians can upload so-called evidence to this website which will be sent to the ICC should disqualify all of the P.A.'s submissions in advance.”
The P.A. “systematically lies ... to demonize Israelis,” he said, making it “impossible to imagine” that Palestinians, who have imbibed these libels, would tell the truth, Marcus said. Particularly egregious examples put out on the P.A.’s official channels that he cited include the allegation that Israel has genetically engineered super rats to spread misery and disease among Palestinians, and has dug up deceased Palestinian landowners, removed their fingers and used their fingerprints to fake land sale contracts to Jews.
“When these are the kind of horrific libels coming from the leadership, we can be certain that the entire dossier of so-called evidence being sent to the ICC from the leaders and from the general population is totally worthless,” Marcus said.
Despite the P.A.’s ongoing production of outlandish accusations against Israel, the monitoring center couched its work in high-minded language, with the center’s home page describing its goals as “protecting evidence and national memory,” “supporting justice and demanding accountability,” and “building a Palestinian, independent, reliable, and sustainable authority.”
PMW, which has been collecting information about P.A. contacts with the ICC, learned of the center’s existence from Abu al-Rub’s comments on Palestine TV in mid-August. PMW then located the P.A.’s original July 29 announcement of the center.
PMW prepared a report, which included information about the center, and submitted to the U.S. State Department during the week of Sept. 7.
On Sept. 16, the State Department announced it was extending “sanctions that deny visas to PLO members and P.A. officials,” citing, among other reasons, the P.A.’s “actions to internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict including through the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ).”
The most immediate effect of the State Department’s move was to prevent P.A. delegates from attending the United Nations General Assembly annual debate, now in session in New York City.
The Trump administration is hostile to the ICC, which it views as a globalist entity attempting to impose its will on countries outside its jurisdiction. Although neither Israel nor the U.S. is a signatory to the treaty that created the ICC, the court has acted as if it has jurisdiction over them.
In 2020, the court ruled its chief prosecutor could investigate U.S. forces for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan. In 2024, it issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
On Feb. 6, 2025, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” imposing “tangible and significant consequences” on ICC officials and those who assist the ICC in bringing harassing legal action against “the United States, Israel, or any other ally of the United States that has not consented to ICC jurisdiction.”
The P.A. was instrumental in paving the way for the arrest warrants against Israel’s leaders, urging the court in 2018 to investigate Israel for “past, ongoing and future crimes,” and in 2024 defending the ICC’s jurisdiction, or right, to issue the warrants.
Among the consequences enumerated in Trump’s executive order for foreign persons who support ICC actions is the suspension of their entry into the U.S.
