Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday called the International Criminal Court a "political body" after it said it had jurisdiction over the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

"The tribunal has, once again, proved that it is a political body and not a judicial institution," Netanyahu said in a statement, adding the decision undermined the "right of democracies to defend themselves against terrorism".

The ICC's ruling Friday paves the way for the tribunal's prosecutor to potentially open a war crimes investigation. Palestine is a state party to the court set up in 2002 to try the world's worst crimes, but Israel is not.

Netanyahu issued a furious condemnation of The Hague-based court. "The tribunal ignores real war crimes and instead pursues the state of Israel, a state with a strong democratic government that honours the rule of law and is not a member of the tribunal," he said.

Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had asked the court for its legal opinion on whether its reach extended to areas occupied by Israel, after announcing in December 2019 that she wanted to start a full probe. The ICC said in a statement it had "decided, by the majority, that the Court's territorial jurisdiction in the Situation in Palestine, a State party to the ICC Rome Statute, extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem."