PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas has announced that Palestine will join the International Criminal Court, following the UN security council’s failure to back an Arab resolution setting a three-year deadline to end Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

“We want to complain. There’s aggression against us, against our land. The security council disappointed us,” he said on Wednesday.

Turning to the ICC at The Hague to pursue war-crimes charges against the zionist state marks a major policy shift for Mr Abbas, transforming the Palestinian leadership’s relations with Israel from tense to openly hostile.

The ultimate goal is to press Israel into withdrawing from the territories and accepting Palestinian statehood.

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to take unspecified “retaliatory

steps,” US State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said that Washington was “deeply troubled” by the Palestinians’ “escalatory step.”

He said that it was “entirely counterproductive and does nothing to further the aspirations of the Palestinian people for a sovereign and independent state.”

At the ICC, the Palestinians could seek to have Israeli military or political figures prosecuted for crimes involving settlement construction on occupied lands or actions by the military that cause heavy civilian casualties.

Israel is not a member of the court and does not recognise its jurisdiction.

Mr Netanyahu warned that Israel would protect its troops from prosecution, calling his army “the most moral” in the world.

He blustered that the Palestinian Authority is “the one that needs to fear the International Criminal Court.”

While the court has no police force and no authority to go into Israel and arrest suspects, it could issue arrest warrants to make it difficult for Israeli officials to travel abroad.

Mr Abbas has been under heavy pressure to take stronger action against Israel amid months of rising tensions over the collapse of US-brokered peace talks last spring, Israel’s murderous 50-day assault on Gaza over the summer and Tel Aviv’s restrictions on access to the Al-Aqsa mosque site in Jerusalem.

The Palestinians are expected to submit the paperwork for joining the ICC to UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon today, following which Palestine should become a member within about 60 days.