"I wish to express my thanks to the governments of Croatia and Spain for having brought Ante Gotovina to The Hague," del Ponte told the UN Security Council in New York on Thursday.
Del Ponte said she had received information on Gotovina's whereabouts from Croatian authorities, which led to the general's arrest in Spain's Canary Islands on 7 December.
"On 29 September, the Croatian authorities provided me with indisputable evidence that Gotovina was in Spain," she said, adding that soon after that contact was established between the Croatian and Spanish authorities.
The prosecutor said that she informed the European Union on 3 October that Croatia was indeed fully cooperating with the Hague tribunal, noting that she could not reveal any details regarding Gotovina as that information was kept within a close circle of people in Zagreb, Spain and The Hague for operational reasons.
Del Ponte and Tribunal President Fausto Pocar submitted annual reports to the Security Council on their work, the implementation of the tribunal's completion strategy and cooperation with countries of the former Yugoslavia.
Pocar said that "cooperation with Croatia is now satisfactory." He noted that, with Gotovina arrested, the tribunal was a step closer to bringing all the high ranking accused to justice.
"The key to success was a combination of international incentives, provided mainly by the European Union's consistent policy of conditioning EU accession to the full cooperation with the ICTY, and an effective joint operational plan between Croatia and the ICTY. The United States have also provided valuable support by insisting that Croatia could not join NATO before Gotovina would be in The Hague," said del Ponte.
"After the European Union, in March of this year, postponed the beginning of the accession talks with Croatia, the authorities drew an operational plan together with the ICTY and its implementation started in April," she said.
"The operation was coordinated on the Croatian side by a very limited number of highly motivated, highly professional individuals under the leadership of the State Prosecutor, who had received the proper, strong backing from the political leadership," said del Ponte.
"Since the operation was launched, we received well over 100 reports from different Croatian agencies which were, for the most part, of a good professional quality," she added.
Croatia's permanent representative to the UN, Mirjana Mladineo, said in the discussion at the Security Council that Croatia had cooperated with the ICTY in implementing the action plan to close the Gotovina issue.
She said Croatia had shown it would not accept exceptions from the rule of law and that every indictee must face the indictment and appear before the ICTY.
Mladineo said Croatia was interested in the truth about the Homeland War being known, adding the 1990s war had been defensive, just and legitimate, and that individualising guilt, if it existed, could only strengthen its legitimacy.
Del Ponte said the Croatian model of international incentives and the joint Croatia-ICTY operational plan could "serve us as a model to overcome the difficulties we meet in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Serbia and Montenegro".
She said that neither the international community nor Republika Srpska nor Serbia and Montenegro were doing enough to arrest and hand over indictees. She added that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were within the reach of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro.
Del Ponte said she was working with NATO and EUFOR in Sarajevo on a programme to break their support networks.
She went on to say that the international community conditioned the Euro-Atlantic integration of the two countries, giving them political incentive to arrest the indictees, but added the capture of Karadzic and Mladic was no longer such a high priority for the international community whose "involvement... has been minimal, at least over the past two years".
"For ten years, the international community has been playing cat-and-mouse with Karadzic and Mladic," she said, adding that "the cats chose to wear blindfolds... and to allow the mice to run from one hole to another".
"It is time for the international community and the local governments, especially in Serbia and Montenegro and the Republika Srpska, to take concerted action to find the places where these fugitives are hiding and to arrest them and turn them over to the ICTY," del Ponte said in her address.