The Palestinian Authority has frozen its petition to the International Criminal Court at The Hague against the United States for its recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the relocation of the US embassy to the city.
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The petition, which was initially filed in September 2018 when former US President Donald Trump was in office, claimed the decision violated international law and therefore qualified as a war crime.
The ICC initially intended to review the Palestinian petition in June 2021, but two months earlier the PA submitted a request to suspend the proceedings. The ICC said in a report that the PA's request was coordinated with the Biden administration.
"In the letter to the tribunal registry on April 12, 2021," the court said, "the State of Palestinian verbally requested a deferral of the proceedings that were supposed to take place on June 1, 2021, in order to provide the sides an opportunity to find a solution to the disagreement through negotiations."
A week later, according to the ICC, the Biden administration responded that it "had no objection to the petitioner's request."
"Taking into account the opinions if the sides, the court decided to suspend the discussions until further notice," the ICC said.
The belief in Israel is that the Palestinians suspended the lawsuit to facilitate the Biden administration's efforts to reopen the Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem. Israeli officials were aware of the suspension, calling it "a technical procedure that can be reversed at any moment."
In an interview with Al Arabiya, an international Arabic television news channel based in Dubai, Bilal al-Shobaki, the head of the political science department at Hebron University, said: "The Palestinian withdrawal was meant as a gesture of goodwill toward Washington to strengthen relations with it. The Palestinian leadership understands that a petition to the International Criminal Court [against the US] won't lead anywhere tangible and won't be beneficial to the interests of the Palestinians."
According to al-Shobaki, "Palestine is too weak to adequately contend with Washington in international institutions. Washington has the ability to bypass all international bodies, even the United Nations Security Council."
He added that in his view, the Palestinian Authority's petition against the US decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv was, from the outset, a "propagandistic measure meant to justify the PA's existence."
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