Is Israel a signatory of the ICC treaty? Does the ICC have universal jurisdiction?
To my knowledge, this is also the grounds on which the US and UK dispute jurisdiction: They say, no country in this conflict that they recognise is ICC signatory, so the ICC does not have jurisdiction.
(Not a lawyer, but this seems a pretty spurious and self-referential legal argument to me and in any case the UN accepted Palestine as an observer state, so I doubt that it would fly.)
Because from what I hear, that “Palestine” doesn’t really exist.
There’s Gaza, and there’s the West Bank.
Most countries which recognise Palestine as a state seem to recognise it in the 1967 borders, i.e. Gaza + West Bank + East Jerusalem.
Not sure about the UN though.
> For now, the announcement is largely symbolic. Israel is not a member of the court and does not recognize its jurisdiction in Israel or Gaza, meaning that Israeli leaders would face no risk of arrest at home.
The US is also not a member
Like there is no such thing as a "universal" right, law, lawful action or anything. There is just "agreements/policies" countries enforce by the power of their military/economical/geopolitical might not by jurisdiction, through for practical reasons most times there is a _self imposed_ jurisdiction of some form.
Through in most cases (i.e. not war, special military operation) this "upholding" is limited to their territories.
The jurisdiction the ICC has imposed on themself is, more or less, to judge war crimes and genocide by anyone anywhere internationally.
In practice this means anyone anywhere as long as the power of the ICC member states allow them to do so (in a for the member reasonable way).
Practically the only place in which countries can reliable enforce such things is in their territory/people. E.g. this means they don't enforce it when the person committing the crime is an US Citizen because they are not powerful enough to force the US to allow them to do so.
What that means in this case is, that assuming a warrant is issued, they will be arrested iff they step into member state territory. And even then it might depend on the individual power of the member state and the context under which they stepped into the member state.
Through iff ICC members would be far more powerful and united, things could be very different.
E.g. the US imprisoning no US Citizens arrested outside of US territory in Guantanamo was a case of "having enough power to enforce their rules outside of their territory". (But it's also a terrible example given such arrests in general didn't follow the procedure you would expect from a state of law (or the ICC) and we know today involved more then just one or two innocents. Heck if the ICC had the power they would likely have judged that to be a war crime and issued an arrest for the people responsible for it.)