Some believe International Criminal Court will not come after Israel - yet

Reporting on a new paper from the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor on the prioritization of cases, the Jerusalem Post suggests Israel is not going to be on the front burner any time soon - or at least so long as Israel is aggressively investigating and prosecuting allegations of its own so-called war crimes in Gaza. The story fails to notice, however, that the ICC statute purports to render settlements war crimes and self-investigation on this issue is a non-starter.

The story says:

"A report by the International Criminal Court Prosecution explaining its methodology for prioritizing which cases to push forward with the fastest indicates that it is unlikely to take action against Israel in the near future, but that settlements as war crimes may eventually be center-stage.

Since January 2015, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has been preliminarily examining Israel and 'Palestine' for alleged war crimes violations relating to the 2014 Gaza war.

The report issued by the ICC Prosecutor's Office at the end of last week, but not previously reported on in Israel, does not mention Israel or the Palestinians specifically.

But the report does frame its principles for selecting cases for investigations or prosecutions, and states explicitly that 'if national authorities are conducting or have conducted investigations or prosecutions...and such investigations or prosecutions have not been vitiated by an unwillingness or inability to genuinely carry them out, the case will not be selected for further investigation or prosecution.'

The IDF legal division has investigated or is still investigating 31 criminal cases and a range of 360 other preliminary cases, including all of the three main cases that the ICC Prosecutor has previously expressed the most interest in.

According to Bensouda's explicit statement in the report on prioritization of cases, she will not choose to get more deeply involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as long as Israel's investigations are ongoing..."