ANALYSIS
The Israel Defense Forces spent more than a year insisting its soldiers were not in the area when 5-year-old Hind Rajab, her relatives, and then the two Palestine Red Crescent Society medics dispatched to rescue her were killed in Gaza City in January 2024. That denial, repeated to journalists and international bodies, has now been quietly retired. On Wednesday, the IDF's Military Advocate-General's Corps published its first war crimes accountability report since October 7, acknowledging that the killing of Hind Rajab and her family is among more than 150 incidents now under formal criminal investigation, as Common Dreams reported.
The announcement was framed as accountability. It is better understood as a legal maneuver — and the IDF's own institutional history makes that case more persuasively than any critic could.
The opening of an IDF investigation is not a step toward accountability. It is the mechanism by which accountability is foreclosed. These probes do not exist to produce prosecutions. They exist to produce closure — a documented process that Western governments can point to when asked why they continue supplying weapons, diplomatic cover, and Security Council vetoes to Israel. The investigation is the impunity, not its remedy.
The Military Advocate-General's Corps report covers more than 150 probes. Among the cases under investigation: the January 2024 killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab and six relatives, and the subsequent attack on the PRCS ambulance dispatched to rescue survivors, which killed two medics. Also under investigation: the apparent execution-style killing of 15 first responders — PRCS medics, Civil Defense personnel, and a UN worker — traveling in a convoy in Rafah in March 2025. Separately, the IDF cleared troops involved in the April 2024 World Central Kitchen strike that killed seven aid workers, and troops who fired on a house where Doctors Without Borders staff were sheltering, killing two women.
The pattern is not hypothetical. The IDF's investigation into the May 2022 killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — which the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, and multiple independent investigations concluded was carried out by Israeli forces — ended without charges. The investigation into the World Central Kitchen strike, which killed seven members of an international aid team in April 2024, ended this week: troops cleared. The investigation into the February 2024 tank attack on a house in al-Mawasi where Médecins Sans Frontières staff and their families were sheltering — two women killed, seven wounded — also ended in clearance, despite Israeli officials having initially denied carrying out the attack at all.
The Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation, established specifically to challenge Israeli impunity, put the structural reality plainly in a statement Wednesday: "Investigations into violations committed by Israeli forces overwhelmingly end without meaningful examination, prosecution, or punishment. In the small number of cases in which soldiers have been convicted of crimes, the punishments imposed have often been exceptionally lenient or administrative in nature." The Foundation cited Abu Akleh as the paradigm case — a killing documented by multiple independent bodies, investigated internally, and resolved without consequence.
British journalist Owen Jones, writing on X Wednesday, went further on the question of institutional credibility: "The Israeli army lied through their teeth. They claimed no Israeli troops were operating in the area where Hind Rajab and her family were killed. They lie and lie and lie again — yet Western media outlets still treat Israeli claims as credible." The observation cuts to something the IDF's accountability report cannot address: the investigation process depends on the same institution that spent over a year denying the underlying facts. An army that lied about whether its soldiers were present at a massacre is now conducting the criminal inquiry into that massacre.
The power dynamic in this process is straightforward. The IDF's Military Advocate-General's Corps — the body conducting these investigations — reports to the IDF chain of command. It is not an independent civilian prosecutor. It is not an international body. It is the military investigating itself, using procedures it designed, producing reports it controls the release of. When the system clears troops, there is no appeal mechanism available to the families of the dead. When the system opens an investigation, there is no external authority capable of demanding it conclude within a specific timeframe, apply a specific evidentiary standard, or produce a public-facing result.
This is the architecture that has allowed the same cycle to repeat across decades of Israeli military operations: denial, then investigation, then clearance or token punishment, then the next incident. It is not a broken system. It is a functioning one — functioning precisely as designed, for the benefit of those who designed it.
What makes Wednesday's report different in scale, if not in kind, is the sheer number of cases it encompasses. More than 150 probes cover a conflict in which, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023. The March 2025 Rafah killing of 15 first responders — PRCS medics, Civil Defense workers, and a United Nations employee traveling in a clearly marked convoy — was captured on video and documented by multiple humanitarian organizations before the IDF announced any investigation. The gap between what was witnessed and what the investigation process is likely to produce is not a gap in evidence. It is a gap in political will.
That political will is, in turn, sustained by the same Western governments whose statements of "concern" about civilian casualties have been consistently decoupled from any material consequence. As Tinsel News has reported, the United States is simultaneously working to dismantle the International Criminal Court — the one body with the jurisdictional mandate to investigate these killings independently. And as the Senate's recent arms votes make clear, even the growing domestic political pressure to condition military aid to Israel has not translated into any change in the flow of weapons that make these operations possible.
The Hind Rajab Foundation's framing of IDF investigations as ending "without meaningful examination, prosecution, or punishment" is not pessimism. It is a description of the documented record. The IDF has now confirmed what it spent over a year denying: its forces killed a 5-year-old child, her family, and the medics who came to save her. The question the investigation will not answer — because it is not designed to — is who in the chain of command authorized firing hundreds of rounds at a civilian vehicle carrying a child, and whether those same people remain in positions of authority today. It is a pattern documented beyond Gaza's borders as well — in Lebanon, Israeli strikes killed paramedics on active rescue missions even as ceasefire agreements nominally held.
The families of Hind Rajab, the two PRCS medics, the 15 first responders killed in Rafah, and the seven World Central Kitchen workers did not receive accountability on Wednesday. They received a process. And the process, as the record shows, is designed to end where it began: with no one charged, no command responsibility established, and the same military ready to deny the next incident until the evidence becomes too documented to dispute.
