The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) latest advisory opinion, delivered on 22 October 2025, was issued amid unprecedented humanitarian and political impunity.
In Gaza, entire cities lie in ruins after two years of relentless genocide. In the West Bank, settler colonial violence has multiplied, with mass arrests, forced displacement and settler attacks soaring.
Across the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT), United Nations agencies operate under siege.
Against this backdrop, the ICJ’s opinion marked yet another decisive affirmation of international law’s limits on power, and a challenge to the political order that has normalised lawlessness.
It confronts not only Israel’s legal responsibilities as an unlawful occupying power, but also the complicity of states whose silence or support has sustained the status quo.
A legal clarification amid escalating violations
Requested by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), this is the third advisory opinion on Palestine since 2004. It examines Israel’s obligations in relation to the presence and activities of the United Nations, other international organisations, and third States in, and in relation to, the OPT.
Its conclusions leave no room for ambiguity. Israel remains bound by the full spectrum of international humanitarian and human rights law and is under a binding duty to ensure the Palestinian population’s access to the essentials of life - food, water, fuel, medical care, and shelter - and to facilitate, not obstruct, relief efforts of the United Nations and other humanitarian actors.
“The October 2025 ICJ opinion strengthens and expands the Court’s earlier conclusions by reaffirming Israel’s legal obligation to facilitate humanitarian aid and protect UN agencies like UNRWA under international law,” Wesam Ahmad, an independent Palestinian human rights advocate and research fellow with the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam, told The New Arab.
“It directly condemns Israel’s obstruction of relief operations, affirming that such actions violate the Geneva Conventions and further entrench its unlawful occupation.”
The ICJ rejected Israel’s routine invocation of “security” to justify collective punishment, including blocking aid, targeting UN staff, or undermining the operations of UN agencies, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). These obligations, it stressed, stem not from political goodwill, but from binding duties rooted in international law - duties that Israel has flouted for decades.
Crucially, the Court explicitly recognised UNRWA as the backbone of humanitarian assistance in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel’s attacks on UNRWA’s mandate and its baseless accusations against the agency’s staff do not absolve it of its obligations. On the contrary, the ICJ reaffirmed that UN agencies’ privileges and immunities, enshrined in the UN Charter, remain binding on Israel.
This finding carries major political weight. It dismantles the narrative that Israel can decide which international bodies operate in the occupied territory. It also provides the UN and member states with a legal foundation to insist, rather than merely request, unhindered humanitarian access.
By reaffirming UNRWA’s legitimacy, the Court also issued a clear warning to donor governments that had suspended funding to UNRWA. Such decisions, the ICJ’s reasoning suggests, may amount to complicity in denying humanitarian relief - a potential breach of international law.
“The ICJ makes clear that third states must not assist or recognise illegal situations, making continued arms transfers and defunding UNRWA legally indefensible,” explained Ahmad.
“Such actions risk complicity in international crimes, including genocide, and breach binding obligations of non-assistance under international law.”
From humanitarian crisis to structural illegality
Beyond its humanitarian framing, the opinion situates Israel’s conduct within the broader illegality of its prolonged occupation. The ICJ reaffirmed that Israel’s indefinite, expansionist control over the OPT, alongside the transfer of its own population into settlements, violates the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and the prohibition on acquiring territory by force.
In doing so, the ICJ reconnected humanitarian access to the structural illegality of the occupation itself, linking Israel’s aid blockade, dismantling of Palestinian institutions, and settlement enterprises as components of one system of domination.
In this sense, the opinion builds upon the ICJ’s 19 July 2024 advisory opinion, which found Israel’s occupation unlawful and identified apartheid structures sustaining it. Together, the two opinions form a comprehensive legal indictment of Israel’s regime of control and the international complicity that enables it.
Yet, as some commentators caution, not all see this as progress.
“The Advisory Opinion provided a regurgitation of the Israeli regime’s responsibilities as an occupying power and a UN member state – which are not new or unknown,” Lubnah Shomali, Advocacy Manager at BADIL Resource Centre for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, told TNA. “The Advisory Opinion just gathered those obligations into one document. So, it did not build on any of the previous opinions,” she added.
“Nor did it address the responsibilities of the UN and third states on the situation at hand - the Israeli regime’s ongoing unwillingness to fulfil those clearly defined obligations which has spanned 78 years (since it came into existence). Without concrete recommendations and practical measures for the UN and states, including mechanisms to enforce compliance, this ICJ AO is performative and empty.”
Shomali further warned that ‘the ICJ was created to rule on matters of law. By endorsing the two-state political framework - as it did in the June 2024 Advisory Opinion - it is overstepping its mandate, again”.
This criticism underscores a central tension in the ICJ’s work: while it seeks to reaffirm the rule of law, it often stops short of confronting the political structures that sustain illegality.
Yet, despite its limitations, the Court’s latest opinion still advances a crucial legal narrative. It connects Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe and the targeting of UN agencies to that same structural unlawfulness underpinning Israel’s prolonged occupation. The denial of aid, it underscored, is not collateral damage, but a deliberate policy of domination.
By situating the humanitarian crisis within the broader system of occupation and annexation, the Court rejects the discourse that divorces the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza from its inherently political underpinning.
In other words, the ICJ challenges the international tendency to treat Gaza’s “humanitarian crisis” as detached from its broader context of unlawful occupation and annexation - a framing that conveniently depoliticises Israel’s settler colonial regime.
Third states under renewed scrutiny
While the ICJ addressed Israel’s obligations directly, its reasoning reverberates far beyond. The Court also puts third states under renewed scrutiny. It reiterates that all states have a duty under international law not to recognise, aid, or assist in maintaining an unlaw situation.
For Western governments that continue to supply Israel with arms, diplomatic cover, or economic cooperation, this raises a fundamental question: can a state claim to uphold the rule of law while enabling its systematic violation?
This legal clarity sharpens the accountability lens on states that suspended UNRWA funding or blocked resolutions ensuring humanitarian access. The ICJ’s message is clear: what has been treated as a “policy choice” is in fact a matter of legal obligation. Thus, failing to act is laid bare for what it really is: not neutrality but complicity.
For advocates, the advisory opinion provides powerful leverage. It crystallises decades of legal consensus into a clear directive: Israel must lift its blockade, restore humanitarian corridors, and end collective punishment. Third states, meanwhile, must enforce compliance through concrete measures, including arms embargoes, sanctions, and the full reinstatement of UNRWA funding.
Still, the ICJ’s authority is legal and moral, not coercive. International law is toothless, and thus, while the Court’s findings are binding in substance, they lack direct enforcement mechanisms.
Israel’s immediate dismissal of the ruling only highlights how impunity thrives in the absence of political will. As such, law alone cannot bring justice; it must be backed by the courage to enforce it. Otherwise, the law remains declarative, rather than transformative.
Reclaiming the political power of law
The Court’s opinion is not revolutionary. It is a reaffirmation of what international law has long made clear: occupation, annexation, and collective punishment are unlawful, and states are bound, not invited, to act accordingly.
Its deeper significance lies in exposing the widening gap between the clarity of international law and the hypocrisy of global politics. The ruling challenges the normalisation of lawlessness, where humanitarian aid becomes a substitute for justice, and legality a matter of convenience.
It reminds the world that relief cannot substitute for rights, and that legality without enforcement sustains the very system of domination it condemns.
“The opinion reveals a widening gulf between legal clarity and political inaction, exposing entrenched impunity,” Ahmad said. “Yet, it equips civil society and legal advocates with powerful tools to demand accountability, pressure states, and pursue enforcement through domestic and international mechanisms.”
The opinion offers a chance, perhaps one of the last, to reclaim international law as a tool of accountability rather than rhetoric. It gives advocates and institutions a framework to demand action, defend what remains of multilateralism, and expose the cost of selective enforcement.
The World Court has spoken with clarity and authority. Whether states listen, or once again look away, will determine the credibility of international law itself, far beyond the question of Palestine.
Shatha Abdulsamad is a Palestinian researcher and policy analyst based in Berlin. She is a Policy Member at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network
Follow her on X at @shathaasamad