"The International Criminal Court Prosecutor's Office published its annual report on Monday on preliminary examinations of war crimes allegations, including regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict...
Israel is starting to pay a concrete price for the December 2016 UN Security Council resolution, which was the first in decades to declare, without a US veto, the settlements illegal. Many viewed the Obama administration's refusal to veto the resolution as a parting shot at the Netanyahu government for failing to progress in peace negotiations at a pace it considered acceptable.
For the first time in several reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ICC prosecutor cited this resolution as reaffirming 'the occupied status of the West Bank' as well as explicitly condemning 'the 'construction and expansion of settlements, transfer of Israeli settlers, confiscation of land, demolition of homes and displacement of Palestinian civilians, in violation of international humanitarian law.' This means that the ICC prosecutor may feel freer than ever before to treat Israeli settlements in the West Bank as war crimes, even though no court in history has done so until now. The report in general also spends more time on the settlement issue than in past reports. This has been the nightmare scenario which led Israel to refuse to ratify the ICC's Rome Statute at the last second, after having been involved in drafting it for years...
Maybe the central words are 'phase two.' Israel is still viewed as only in phase two of the analysis of whether to move to a full criminal investigation. It will need to be in phase three for some time before the ICC prosecutor makes a final decision...
This means that the ICC Prosecutor's Office has probably had its hands too full with deciding whether to go after the US and has been distracted from fully focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Any final decision is almost certainly a year, if not multiple years, away."