The petition, involving a 300-page dossier of evidence, asks for a formal acknowledgement and apology for abuses during the period of British rule in Palestine from 1917 until 1948, after which Britain rapidly withdrew and the State of Israel was declared.
It is being brought by Munib al-Masri, 88, a well-known Palestinian business owner and former politician, who was shot and wounded by British troops as a boy in 1944.
The request for an apology is likely to reopen the debate over delivering modern-day accountability for colonial-era crimes, while also being viewed in the context of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Two senior international lawyers are involved in the project, asked by Mr. al-Masri to carry out an independent review of the evidence. They are Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and the British barrister Ben Emmerson KC, former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism.
Mr. Emmerson says the legal team has unearthed evidence of "shocking crimes committed by certain elements of the British Mandatory forces systematically on the Palestinian population."
"They are some of them of such enormous gravity that they would have been regarded even then as breaches of customary international law," he told the BBC.
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