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According to Israel's Guide to the Mideast Peace Process, charges regarding the illegality of Israeli settlements in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) have no foundation in international law. Peace efforts between Israel and Palestine will have no chance of success as long as Israel uses its prolonged military occupation to promote and protect its annexation-in-disguise of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. John Dugard has passed on this hard truth consistently as Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the OPT. The international community should take the same hard line towards the Guide as it has done towards the Hamas Charter. If it wants to establish a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, it should not allow Israel to bend the truth any more in respect of the legality of the Israeli settlements in the OPT as Hamas has done in respect of the illegality of Israel.

The impartial and nearly unanimous advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice in the Wall case put the role of politics and diplomacy in the settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in its proper place, within the context of the rule of law. The significance of the opinion goes far beyond the illegality of the construction of the wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The Court wisely and courageously seized the opportunity of its first direct involvement in the conflict to speak in plain legal terms about the tricky political problems that have ruined the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. It ascertained the present responsibility of the United Nations to protect Palestine's statehood. It affirmed the applicability of the prohibition of acquisition of Palestinian territory by Israel and confirmed the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the OPT. Moreover, the existence of the Palestinian people as the rightful claimant to the OPT is no longer open to question. One may only regret that the UN was not able to ask the Court to throw light on the Palestinian question at a much earlier stage.

On 6 February 1996, the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina informed the Implementation Force (IFOR) that eight Serbs, who were reported missing since 20 January, were held in custody by the Bosnian authorities as war crimes suspects. None of them had already been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Among the eight detainees were two high-ranking Serb officers: General Djordje Djukić and Colonel Aleksa Krsmanovic. They were said to have been arrested accidentally by Bosnian police officers during a routine traffic control on 30 January 1996.

The East-West detente has uncovered the importance of statehood for the international protection of peoples in international conflicts. The importance becomes obvious from a comparison between the legal position of the Kuwaitis with that of the Kurds and, more in particular, the Palestinians in that respect. The Gulf war urged the Security Council to enforce Iraq's compliance with the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention. The Council has also taken the position that Israel should apply this convention de jure in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories, albeit lessforcefully. This is partly due to the fact that the UN itself has caused confusion concerning the legal status of these territories. History shows that the Palestine Mandate should not be considered as indivisible in such a way that the creation of Israel automatically implied the termination of the mandate as a whole. The Palestine Mandate still exists for the area of the Arab state, defined in the General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) of November 29,1947, recommending a partition plan for Palestine. Subsequent resolutions of both the General Assembly and the Security Council imply that the Palestinian people can only claim the West Bank including East Jerusalem -hereafter referred to as the West Bank- and the Gaza Strip as its future territory. The Palestinian people appears to have resigned itself to this fact of life since its acceptance of Security Council Resolutions 242 of November 22,1947, and 338 of October 22,1973. In doing so it has stopped any further erosion of its claim to an independent state by virtue of its right to self-determination. Neither the Gulf war nor an international peace conference on the Middle East can alter the new situation one bit anymore. For the first time since 1947 the General Assembly is now in the position to keep the promise of self-determination towards the Palestinian people as well. The 1950 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the international status of South West Africa gives it a good point of departure for assuming its full responsibility for doing justice to the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. Legally speaking the role of the UN in the development of the International Peace Conference on the Middle East is crucial for the future of Israel and Palestine.