Sample Essay: Hamas-Israel Conflict — A Test Case for Global Governance

Topic

Hamas-Israel Conflict: A Test Case for World Conscience

Rough Work

Exam Rough Work (what you actually write in the hall: about 200 words)

• Keywords: test case / world conscience. The subject is the institutions being tested, not who is right.
• Type: analytical-argumentative. Thesis: a stress test of the rules-based order that exposed selective enforcement; the inconsistency damaged confidence more than the dispute itself.
• Baseline, both sides: UN OCHA and WHO figures for Gaza, provisional (sure); 7 October 2023, about 1,200 killed and about 250 hostages (sure).
• Law: distinction and proportionality; the ban on hostage-taking (1979 Convention); non-state actors are bound too (sure).
• Council: draft resolutions vetoed from Oct 2023 to early 2024 (sure); Ukraine 2022, 141 votes in the General Assembly (sure).
• Courts: ICJ, South Africa's case Dec 2023, provisional measures Jan 2024 (sure); ICC Prosecutor's applications May 2024 against Israeli and Hamas leaders (sure).
• Comparison: Syria, Yemen, Sudan (sure).
• Counter: state against non-state, different legal frameworks. Rebuttal: Syria is a state bound by the same Geneva rules, so status alone does not explain the gap.
• Way forward: GA Resolution 76/262, 2022 (sure); the French-Mexican initiative; independent commissions; uniform monitoring; civil society.
• Discourse: narration in the ICJ and ICC steps; description kept factual by design; argumentation in IV.
• Hook: the phrase "test case". Closing idea: consistency, not selective invocation.

Full thinking (study version)

Steps 1–2 of the playbook — roughly 25 minutes on the rough sheet, before any outline exists.

Topic:    Hamas-Israel Conflict: A Test Case for World Conscience
Keywords: TEST CASE / world conscience  — the subject is the TESTER, not
          the conflict
Type:     Analytical-argumentative
Scope:    The international system's response. NOT the history of the
          territorial dispute. NOT who is right.
Thesis:   A stress test of the rules-based order — and it exposed selective
          enforcement.

Topic → Prompt (the decode)

The examiner did not ask who is right, and answering that question is how most scripts fail. "Test case" means the conflict is the instrument; the thing being tested is world conscience — that is, the institutions built to embody it.

So the subject of the essay is the UN Security Council, the ICJ, the ICC and international humanitarian law — not Gaza. Once that is settled, the essay writes itself analytically rather than emotionally, and the marks follow.

The finding to build towards: the system's capacity for decisive action correlates with whether a permanent member's ally is implicated, not with the scale of civilian suffering. That is a structural claim, testable against other conflicts, and it is far stronger than any moral assertion.

This is the highest-risk topic in the paper for tone. The essay must narrate both bodies of evidence factually — a system that scrutinises only one party forfeits its claim to impartiality, and so does an essay. Sources described as provisional where they are provisional. No partisanship in either direction.

Brain dump (3 minutes, unfiltered — grouped as the points land)

The factual baseline — both sides, stated plainly

• UN OCHA and WHO: large-scale civilian deaths in Gaza, displacement affecting the great majority of roughly two million residents, extensive destruction of hospitals, schools and housing — figures described by monitors as provisional and continually revised
• 7 October 2023 — approximately 1,200 killed, the overwhelming majority civilians, and roughly 250 taken hostage; reported by Israeli authorities and corroborated by independent journalists and human rights organisations
• Narrating both is not a moral ledger — it establishes that documented violations are attributable to more than one actor

The legal framework — symmetrical obligations

• Distinction and proportionality under the Fourth Geneva Convention, binding on any state
• Gaza among the most densely populated places on earth — case-by-case investigation required, not blanket judgement
• Hostage-taking is criminalised under the Geneva Conventions and the 1979 Hostages Convention; using civilians or civilian infrastructure as shields is prohibited
• Non-state actors are not exempt — the architecture imposes symmetrical if not identical obligations

The Security Council

• Multiple draft resolutions on pauses or ceasefires vetoed between October 2023 and early 2024
• Lawful under Article 27 — and that is precisely the problem. The veto lets any permanent member block collective action whenever a dispute touches its strategic interests
• The contrast: Ukraine 2022 — an emergency special session condemned the invasion 141 votes to few, with sanctions and assistance mobilised within weeks. A rare consensus achieved partly because no permanent member shielded the aggressor

The courts — resilience and fragility together

• ICJ: South Africa instituted proceedings under the 1948 Genocide Convention in December 2023; January 2024 provisional measures ordered prevention of acts under the Convention and urgent humanitarian assistance, while declining an outright ceasefire order — a calibrated ruling that avoided prejudging the merits
• It shows the Court can exercise jurisdiction over the most politically fraught dispute — and that it has no enforcement mechanism beyond referral to the Council, where a veto waits
• ICC, May 2024: the Prosecutor sought warrants against senior Israeli officials and, in parallel, against named Hamas leaders
• The reception is the evidence: several Western governments objected to the first set while accepting the second without complaint; many states across Africa, Latin America and Asia welcomed the symmetry. The institutions functioned; their political reception did not

The comparative case — this is what makes the argument structural

• Syria — several hundred thousand killed, over half the pre-war population displaced since 2011; more than a dozen Russian vetoes shielding the government; far less global protest
• Yemen — blockade and airstrikes; once called the world's worst humanitarian crisis
• Sudan — millions displaced since April 2023, limited high-level mobilisation
• Global concern correlates with the geopolitical visibility of the parties, not the severity of the suffering
• Structural root: each permanent member shields allies and permits action against adversaries — embedded in Charter-era design, not individual hypocrisy

Counter-argument — and it is legitimate

• Israel is a state, subject to the full apparatus of state responsibility; Hamas is a non-state group designated terrorist by many governments — different instruments and channels apply
• Unlike Syria or Yemen, this dispute engages decades of prior Council resolutions and an active occupation-law framework, giving outside powers institutional avenues unavailable elsewhere
• So greater engagement may reflect distinctive legal features rather than discrimination

Rebuttal — partial truth, incomplete explanation

• The same principles — no targeting of civilians, proportionate force, accountability for hostage-taking — are invoked with markedly different urgency depending on who stands accused
• The Syrian government is itself a state bound by identical Geneva obligations, and faced years of documented barrel bombing and chemical weapons use with limited enforcement consequence
• So state status alone cannot explain the disparity — the core critique survives

Way forward

• GA Resolution 76/262, the Veto Initiative, 2022 — an automatic Assembly debate within ten working days of any veto; reputational cost where no legal cost exists
• The French–Mexican initiative on voluntary restraint in mass-atrocity situations
• Independent commissions of inquiry insulated from the veto — their records outlast the controversy and can later support universal-jurisdiction prosecutions
• Uniform monitoring and reporting standards across Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen and Sudan alike
• Civil society and investigative journalism — they kept Rwanda and Srebrenica alive until belated prosecutions followed

Stance (one sentence)

The conflict functions less as a referendum on which party holds the superior claim than as a stress test of the rules-based order, and the response of international law, the Security Council and the courts reveals a pattern of selective enforcement driven by the geopolitical identity of the parties — an inconsistency that has damaged global confidence more than the underlying dispute has.

Clusters

Sequence

Facts on both sides → the legal framework binding both → institutional performance → the comparative evidence → counter and rebuttal → reform → a conclusion refusing to name a villain and landing on consistency rather than selective invocation.

The discipline that makes this essay safe as well as strong. Every contested figure is attributed to a named body and flagged as provisional; both parties' violations are stated in the same register; and the verdict is passed on institutions, never on a people. An examiner can disagree with the analysis and still find nothing to penalise — which on this topic is worth more than eloquence.

Cut — and why

• The history of the dispute from 1917 or 1948. A different essay, and it consumes a thousand words before the actual question begins.
• Any verdict on which side is right. Not what was asked, and it forfeits the analytical high ground.
• Emotive description of casualties. The figures carry more weight stated plainly; rhetoric invites the suspicion of partisanship.
• Predicting the outcome of the ICJ or ICC proceedings. Unknowable, and it dates the script.

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Outline

• I. Introduction
  • Thesis: The Hamas-Israel conflict functions less as a referendum on which party holds the superior moral or legal claim than as a stress test of the international rules-based order itself. The manner in which international humanitarian law, the United Nations Security Council, and international judicial bodies have responded reveals a pattern of selective enforcement that depends heavily on the geopolitical identity of the parties involved. It is this inconsistency, more than the underlying territorial dispute, that has damaged global confidence in the international system's claim to represent a universal conscience.
• II. The Humanitarian Toll as a Universal Legal Concern
  • A. The large-scale civilian death toll, displacement, and destruction of infrastructure in Gaza documented by United Nations agencies
  • B. The toll of the 7 October 2023 attack on Israeli civilians and the taking of hostages
  • C. The principles of distinction and proportionality binding a state actor
  • D. The prohibitions on hostage-taking and the use of civilians as human shields binding a non-state armed actor
• III. The United Nations and International Justice Mechanisms Under Strain
  • A. The repeated use of the veto to block Security Council resolutions on Gaza
  • B. The contrast with the rapid, near-unanimous General Assembly response to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022
  • C. The genocide case brought by South Africa against Israel before the International Court of Justice and its provisional measures order
  • D. The International Criminal Court Prosecutor's parallel applications for arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders and the divergent state reactions that followed
• IV. The Double Standards Debate: Evidence and Counter-Argument
  • A. The comparative neglect of Syria, Yemen, and Sudan against the intense diplomatic mobilisation seen over Gaza and Ukraine
  • B. The structural explanation rooted in the geopolitical alignments of the permanent Security Council members
  • C. The counter-argument that legal and political differences, such as the presence of an occupying state power versus a non-state armed group, justify differentiated treatment rather than proving hypocrisy
  • D. The rebuttal that, even granting such legal complexity, the empirical asymmetry in how identical humanitarian principles are enforced still undermines the international order's claim to universality
• V. Way Forward: Restoring the Credibility of International Law
  • A. Proposals for restraint on the use of the veto in situations of mass atrocity, including the "Veto Initiative" resolution
  • B. Strengthening independent fact-finding missions and the reach of universal jurisdiction
  • C. Uniform monitoring and reporting standards applied to all conflicts regardless of geopolitical alignment
  • D. The role of independent commissions of inquiry and international civil society in sustaining pressure for consistent accountability
• VI. Conclusion

Essay

The war that erupted after the Hamas-led attack of 7 October 2023, and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza has been described in many capitals as a moral crossroads for humanity. Yet the phrase "test case for world conscience" is most useful not as an invitation to assign final blame within a decades-old territorial and political dispute, but as a lens through which to examine the international system surrounding the conflict. Long before the current war, scholars of international relations warned that the credibility of international humanitarian law and the United Nations rested on the willingness of powerful states to apply their own declared principles evenly. This conflict has placed that willingness under sharper scrutiny than almost any crisis in recent memory. The Hamas-Israel conflict functions less as a referendum on which party holds the superior moral or legal claim than as a stress test of the international rules-based order itself. The manner in which international humanitarian law, the United Nations Security Council, and international judicial bodies have responded reveals a pattern of selective enforcement that depends heavily on the geopolitical identity of the parties involved. It is this inconsistency, more than the underlying territorial dispute, that has damaged global confidence in the international system's claim to represent a universal conscience.

The starting point for any sober analysis must be the human cost borne by civilian populations, described in factual rather than partisan terms. United Nations agencies, including the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organization, have documented a large-scale civilian death toll in Gaza, displacement affecting the great majority of the territory's roughly two million residents, and extensive destruction of hospitals, schools, and housing stock, figures that monitors describe as provisional and continually revised rather than final. This evidence, drawn from agencies mandated to report on humanitarian conditions rather than to adjudicate political fault, demonstrates that the conflict has produced civilian suffering of a scale international humanitarian law was designed to prevent. Regardless of how responsibility for the war's origins is apportioned, this toll sets the baseline against which the performance of international protective mechanisms must be measured.

A parallel and equally factual narrative concerns the events of 7 October 2023, when Hamas-led fighters crossed into southern Israel and killed approximately twelve hundred people, the overwhelming majority civilians, while taking roughly two hundred and fifty hostages into Gaza, figures reported by Israeli authorities and corroborated by independent journalists and human rights organisations. This single day of violence, described by international monitors as among the deadliest attacks on Jewish civilians in decades, produced lasting trauma across Israeli society and directly precipitated the military campaign that followed. Narrating this episode is essential not to weigh it against Palestinian civilian losses in a zero-sum moral ledger, but to establish that the conflict involves documented humanitarian violations attributable to more than one actor. A system of international law that scrutinises only one party's conduct forfeits its claim to impartial application.

These parallel facts acquire legal significance because international humanitarian law imposes specific obligations on any state conducting military operations, chief among them distinction, which requires combatants to differentiate between military objectives and civilians, and proportionality, which prohibits attacks expected to cause civilian harm excessive to the military advantage anticipated. Organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross have repeatedly invoked these Fourth Geneva Convention principles when assessing urban warfare conducted in densely populated territories. Gaza, among the most densely populated places on earth, presents an especially difficult case. Applying these standards requires detailed, case-by-case investigation rather than blanket judgment, yet the scale of documented civilian harm has led several UN-mandated commissions of inquiry to call for independent investigation into whether these obligations were consistently honoured. These obligations bind any state party to the Geneva Conventions, and they form one half of the legal framework against which the conflict must be measured.

International humanitarian law does not exempt non-state armed groups from its reach. It explicitly prohibits hostage-taking, criminalised under both the Geneva Conventions and the 1979 International Convention against the Taking of Hostages, and it likewise forbids the use of civilians or civilian infrastructure as shields for military operations. Human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have documented instances of armed groups in Gaza operating from or near densely populated areas, while the continued captivity of hostages for over a year after 7 October constituted an ongoing violation regardless of the legitimacy claimed for the broader cause. These findings matter because they demonstrate that the legal architecture governing the conflict imposes symmetrical, if not identical, obligations on state and non-state parties alike. An evenhanded test must therefore ask not only whether the laws of war were honoured, but whether scrutiny of their violation has been applied with equal rigour to both parties.

The United Nations Security Council, entrusted under the Charter with primary responsibility for international peace and security, has struggled visibly to translate humanitarian urgency into binding action. Between October 2023 and early 2024, several draft resolutions calling for humanitarian pauses or ceasefires in Gaza were vetoed, most often by the United States on the grounds that such measures failed to condemn Hamas or safeguard Israel's security, a use of the veto lawful under Article 27 of the Charter yet one that repeatedly prevented the Council from issuing a unified response. This pattern illustrates a structural feature of the Council rather than an anomaly specific to this conflict: the veto vested in five permanent members allows any one of them to block collective action whenever a dispute touches their strategic interests. The body charged with the world's most solemn peace-and-security mandate has therefore appeared unable to act precisely when civilian suffering was most acute.

This contrast sharpens when set against the General Assembly's swift, near-unanimous condemnation of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, adopted in an emergency special session by a vote of one hundred and forty-one member states in favour, a rare consensus achieved partly because no permanent member with a veto shielded the aggressor from censure. Diplomats and scholars observed that the speed of that response, including sweeping sanctions and sustained military assistance mobilised within weeks, stood in visible contrast to the far more halting response to Gaza, where repeated Assembly emergency sessions produced only non-binding calls for humanitarian truces. This comparison does not suggest either crisis received an undeserved response, but rather that the system's capacity for decisive collective action correlates closely with whether a permanent member's ally, rather than a member itself, is implicated. That correlation is the double standard critics point to when they question whether humanitarian principles are applied consistently across conflicts.

Parallel to the political organs of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice became a central forum for testing legal accountability when South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel in December 2023, alleging violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention. In January 2024, the Court issued provisional measures ordering Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent acts falling under the Convention and to ensure the provision of urgent humanitarian assistance, while declining South Africa's request for an outright ceasefire order, a calibrated ruling that avoided prejudging the merits of the genocide allegation itself. This outcome demonstrated that the Court could exercise jurisdiction even over one of the world's most politically fraught disputes, yet the case also revealed the limits of judicial authority in the absence of an enforcement mechanism, since the Court possesses no independent means of compelling compliance beyond referral to the Security Council, where a veto could again intervene. The proceedings therefore show both the resilience and the structural fragility of international judicial mechanisms.

In May 2024, the International Criminal Court's Prosecutor, Karim Khan, announced applications for arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials, including the Prime Minister and Defence Minister, alongside parallel applications against named Hamas leaders. It was an unusual instance of the Court pursuing accountability against both a sitting government and a non-state armed group simultaneously. The reactions were sharply divergent. Several Western governments criticised the warrants against Israeli officials as inappropriate while accepting those against Hamas commanders without objection, whereas many states across Africa, Latin America, and Asia welcomed the symmetry of the Prosecutor's approach as evidence of impartial justice. This asymmetric reception demonstrates that the credibility of international criminal justice depends not only on the even-handedness of the Prosecutor's legal reasoning but on whether powerful states accept judicial scrutiny of their allies, a willingness far less consistent than the Court's own stated even-handedness. The institutions of international law functioned, in the narrow sense of issuing findings and warrants. Their political reception exposed the same selective logic already visible in the Security Council.

Viewed comparatively, the intensity of diplomatic and media attention devoted to Gaza, and earlier to Ukraine, stands in marked contrast to the muted global response to other contemporaneous humanitarian catastrophes. The Syrian civil war, which by conservative estimates has killed several hundred thousand people and displaced more than half the country's pre-war population since 2011, produced over a dozen Russian vetoes shielding the Syrian government from Council censure. Yet it rarely generated the scale of global protest or sustained news coverage witnessed over Gaza. Similarly, the war in Yemen, involving a Saudi-led coalition blockade and airstrikes contributing to what the United Nations once called the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and the ongoing conflict in Sudan, which has displaced millions since April 2023, have received comparatively limited high-level diplomatic mobilisation. The volume of global concern therefore correlates less with the severity of civilian suffering than with the geopolitical visibility of the parties involved.

The structural explanation for this pattern lies substantially in the composition and incentives of the Security Council itself, where each permanent member tends to shield allied governments from binding censure while permitting or encouraging action against adversaries or unaligned parties. Russia's protection of the Syrian government, China's reluctance to endorse intervention touching allied states, and the long-standing pattern of American vetoes shielding Israel from Council censure, a pattern predating the current war by decades, together illustrate that the Council's selective mobilisation is not incidental but embedded in its institutional design. This structural reality means the perceived double standard is less a matter of individual hypocrisy than of a Charter-era architecture concentrating disproportionate power in states with the greatest capacity to shield their partners. Understanding this structural root is essential before considering the strongest objection to the double standards critique, namely that differences in legal categorization between conflicts may justify some disparity in treatment.

A reasonable counter-argument holds that not every disparity in international response reflects hypocrisy, since conflicts differ in genuine legal and factual respects warranting different treatment. Israel is a state exercising internationally recognised, if contested, control and military capacity, subject to the full apparatus of state responsibility under international law. By contrast, Hamas is a non-state armed group designated a terrorist organisation by many governments, a status shaping which legal instruments and diplomatic channels apply to each. Furthermore, unlike Syria or Yemen, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute engages decades of prior Security Council resolutions and an active occupation-law framework that gives outside powers institutional avenues for involvement unavailable elsewhere. Proponents of this view argue that greater international engagement with this conflict reflects these distinctive legal and historical features rather than discriminatory application of humanitarian principle, and that this distinction deserves serious weight before concluding the system is simply hypocritical.

Nevertheless, this counter-argument, while capturing a partial truth, does not fully dissolve the double standards critique it seeks to answer. Even granting that legal categorization differs across conflicts, the same humanitarian principles, the prohibition on targeting civilians, the requirement of proportionate force, and the demand for accountability for hostage-taking, are invoked with markedly different urgency depending on which government or armed group stands accused, irrespective of whether that actor is a state or a non-state party. The Syrian government, itself a state bound by identical Geneva Convention obligations, faced years of documented barrel bombing and chemical weapons use with comparatively limited enforcement consequence, undermining the claim that state status alone explains differentiated treatment. Legal distinctions between conflicts are real, then, but they cannot account for the disparity in diplomatic energy and enforcement willingness observed across cases.

Addressing this credibility deficit requires institutional reform aimed directly at the veto power that so often paralyses the Security Council in precisely the moments when unified action matters most. The General Assembly's 2022 "Veto Initiative," formally Resolution 76/262, now requires that whenever a permanent member casts a veto, the wider Assembly automatically convenes within ten working days to discuss the situation, a modest but meaningful mechanism for imposing reputational cost on an otherwise unaccountable power. Complementary proposals, including the French-Mexican initiative urging permanent members to voluntarily refrain from vetoing resolutions addressing mass atrocities, point toward incremental paths for narrowing the gap between the Council's stated purpose and its practical performance. Although such measures fall short of eliminating the veto altogether, an outcome unlikely to be accepted by the permanent members themselves, they represent genuine, achievable steps toward restoring consistency to the Council's handling of humanitarian emergencies.

Strengthening independent fact-finding missions, commissions of inquiry, and the practical reach of universal jurisdiction offers a further avenue for reducing the politicisation of accountability efforts. When bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council establish independent commissions insulated from Security Council vetoes, their findings, though lacking direct enforcement power, generate documentary records that outlast the immediate political controversy and can later support prosecutions in national courts exercising universal jurisdiction over war crimes regardless of where they occurred. Expanding the resourcing and diplomatic protection afforded to such bodies would reduce their vulnerability to accusations of bias from any side, provided they remain staffed and mandated with rigorous methodological safeguards. This approach shifts some of the burden of accountability away from politically compromised organs and toward mechanisms whose credibility rests on demonstrable evidentiary rigor.

Restoring consistency further requires that the same monitoring and reporting standards be applied uniformly to every armed conflict, regardless of the geopolitical weight of the parties involved, so that Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and Sudan receive comparable documentation, attention, and diplomatic follow-through. Humanitarian organisations and press outlets bear particular responsibility here, since sustained coverage often precedes political mobilisation, and the disproportionate visibility given to some conflicts over others has itself become a subject of academic study in human rights literature. Establishing baseline expectations, whether through UN reporting protocols or independent journalistic standards, for how systematically each conflict is documented would help ensure that attention tracks the scale of civilian harm rather than the political salience of the parties involved.

Finally, independent commissions of inquiry and an engaged international civil society play an indispensable role in sustaining pressure for accountability once official political channels stall, as they frequently have in this and comparable conflicts. Civil society organisations, investigative journalists, and academic monitors historically kept issues such as the Rwandan genocide and the Srebrenica massacre within public consciousness long after initial diplomatic attention faded, eventually contributing to belated prosecutions and institutional reforms, including the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Applying similar sustained scrutiny to the Hamas-Israel conflict, and to the comparatively neglected wars in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan alike, would help ensure accountability efforts are not simply a function of which conflict currently dominates international headlines.

The Hamas-Israel conflict has, in the end, tested the world's conscience less by forcing a verdict on which party bears greater responsibility for a dispute rooted in decades of unresolved grievance, and more by exposing how unevenly the institutions built to embody that conscience actually function. The documented suffering of civilians on both sides established an undeniable factual baseline. The paralysis of the Security Council, the contested reception of International Court of Justice proceedings, and the divergent reactions to International Criminal Court warrants each revealed a system whose formal commitments to universal principle are frequently overridden by the geopolitical alignments of its most powerful members. The counter-argument that genuine legal distinctions separate this conflict from others carries some force, yet it cannot fully explain why comparable atrocities in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan attracted so much less sustained global attention. What remains, therefore, is not a condemnation of one party as villain and vindication of the other as victim, but a sober recognition that the credibility of international law depends on consistency rather than selective invocation. Reforming the veto, insulating fact-finding from political interference, and demanding uniform standards of attention across conflicts represent achievable, if incremental, steps toward closing that credibility gap. Until such reforms take root, the international community risks treating its own conscience as a matter of convenience rather than principle. The lesson extends far beyond this single conflict to every future crisis in which civilian lives depend on the willingness of powerful states to apply their proclaimed values evenly.

Check before use

• Use dated United Nations humanitarian reports for casualty and displacement estimates.
• Recheck the wording and procedural status of the referenced ICJ and ICC proceedings.