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Israeli army soldiers look at destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip as they stand on the border with the Palestinian territory, on August 13, 2025. (Photo by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images).
On January 29, 2024, five-year-old Hind Rajab and six members of her family were killed by the Israeli military in Gaza City. Hind and her family were killed along with two emergency rescue workers who had gone to rescue her after being granted permission by Israeli authorities. The incident made global headlines after a recording of Hind’s call with Palestinian Red Crescent dispatchers pleading to be rescued was posted online.
Under pressure, the Israeli military announced it had opened an investigation. A month later, the Israeli military said an initial probe suggested its troops were not present in the area at the time of the incident despite satellite images and other evidence proving they were. The Israeli military said the case had been handed over to the General Staff Fact-Finding Assessment (FFA) mechanism. No further findings were ever released and no one was charged.
Hind’s case is just one of the more high profile examples of the systemic impunity and lack of accountability for Israeli soldiers within Israel’s military justice system.
In the 18-month period between when Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza in October 2023 through to March 2025—during which Israel killed over 50,300 Palestinians, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly—the Israeli military filed just three criminal indictments for all Gaza-related offenses, according to six responses to freedom of information requests reviewed by Drop Site that were filed by Israeli human rights group Yesh Din between January 2024 and April 2025. Only one of the indictments resulted in a conviction, while the two other cases are still pending.
The files show that when cases enter the system, they remain there indefinitely under review with no visible endpoint. Investigations are opened very rarely, and they almost never conclude. The system is designed as a smokescreen, human rights groups argue, to give the impression of due process while allowing Israeli soldiers to commit crimes against Palestinians with blanket impunity.
How Israel investigates itself
When allegations of military wrongdoing surface—whether from Palestinian civilians, international aid organizations, media reports, or the Israeli military’s own units—they enter a filtering system overseen by an internal agency known as the office of the Military Advocate General (MAG).
As of August 15, 2024, the military had logged just 95 formal complaints about incidents during the “Swords of Iron War,” Israel’s name for its assault on Gaza. Yet labelling them individual complaints is misleading, as two complaints alone referenced “hundreds of incidents” alleging harm to international aid workers and their facilities.
The MAG decides which of two tracks a complaint can follow. While a fraction are sent directly to criminal investigation, most incidents are first routed through an operational review conducted through the FFA mechanism—a body established in 2014 and staffed by high-ranking officers “for the investigation of exceptional incidents” and to conduct preliminary inquiries into allegations of violations of Israel’s laws of war.
On its English language website, the Israeli military concedes the FFA task forces are headed by military officers with “expertise” in munitions and operations—not in criminal investigations—but claim they “are provided with legal advice” or “accompanied by legal advisors.”
Leaked Israeli Ministry of Justice documents, published by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets) in July 2024, revealed that the military’s claims of involvement by legal experts in the probes are false. In comments on a draft legal filing to a Belgian court, one Ministry of Justice official questioned where the statement about legal experts came from. “I am not aware of such a thing,” the official wrote. She later added that, while the FFA “supposedly should have not only members with experience in military professions, but also in investigations and law, in practice this doesn’t really happen.”
Yesh Din, which has analyzed the work of the FFA mechanism, points out that it “also serves as an operational evaluation tool and for internal military purposes,” creating a conflict of interest between “assigning legal responsibility and opening an investigation of soldiers and commanders who allegedly committed offenses” and as “a means for collecting data in order to improve and add efficiency to the military’s operational capacity.”
This is where the majority of cases are sent to languish. Of the 1,456 “exceptional incidents” referred to the FFA mechanism by August 15, 2024, just 11 were completed, with the rest remaining under review” with no final decision, according to the freedom of information documents. The 1,456 figure includes “incidents referred to the mechanism,” though the FOIA response did not indicate how many of those were followed up on in any meaningful way, and how many were merely logged into the system.
Of the 11 completed FFA mechanism inquiries sent to the MAG, nine were still awaiting a decision on whether criminal investigations would be pursued, and two had resulted in orders to open criminal investigations by Israel’s Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID).
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Criminal investigations: A narrow funnel
In total, the MPCID had opened just 60 criminal investigations by August 15, 2024 and concluded only 12. These included two investigations for the mistreatment of detainees under Israeli custody, 13 investigations regarding “criminal offenses of soldiers against Palestinians and their property in Gaza,” and 45 investigations into the deaths of Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody.
The 12 completed investigations resulted in a single indictment: an Israeli reservist who received seven months in prison for repeatedly beating bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees with his fists, a baton, and an assault rifle at the Sde Teiman detention center.
This was the only conviction and among just three criminal indictments for Gaza-related offenses against Palestinians through March 2025—18 months after the start of the assault.
The two additional indictments were filed in February and March of 2025: One soldier was indicted for looting; and five soldiers were jointly indicted for the July 2024 torture of a blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian detainee in Sde Tmain that received global attention after a surveillance video of the incident was leaked.
“We’re not surprised at all by the low number of indictments,” the data coordinator at Israeli human rights group Yesh Din Noa Cohen told Drop Site. The few indictments that do occur typically result from “a random action or a coincidence or a specific pressure, but in general the system as a whole is really trying to do everything in its power to make sure that the soldiers are immune.” These solitary cases, Cohen said, should be understood as “anecdotes” rather than evidence of a functioning accountability system.
According to the documents obtained through freedom of information requests, the soldier on trial for looting was indicted only because he tried to deposit counterfeit money in his bank account, triggering an investigation. The case exemplifies how the few indictments that emerge are “usually very random—they’re a result of a very random coincidence.”
“We don’t know how many soldiers looted money,” she added. “We don’t know how many soldiers shot at innocent people. We don’t know how many soldiers violated international law in many ways. We will never know,” but, “every reasonable person can assume” there were more than three.
The scale of violations visible in Israeli troops’ own social media posts makes the absence of prosecutions even more damning. Israeli soldiers have posted thousands of videos and photos on social media documenting their own war crimes including the shooting of unarmed civilians and abuse of detainees, looting, and arson. One video shows a soldier celebrating his unit’s destruction of an entire village, saying “We joyously went to annihilate the village of the Nazis.” Another shows a French-Israeli soldier filming a detainee and saying “Look, I’ll show you his back; you’re going to laugh. Look, they tortured him to make him talk.”
The vast amount of self-documented evidence of violations—more than 2,500 such accounts were compiled in a database by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit—has yielded next to nothing in terms of accountability.
Meanwhile, many of Israel’s deadliest operations and policies fall entirely outside of the military justice system. Strikes that kill scores of civilians in order to target a single commander; bombing hospitals; the enforcement of shoot-on-sight “kill zones” documented by Israeli soldiers; the destruction of home and civilian infrastructure; and full spectrum blockades on food, fuel, medicine and other essentials that amount to collective punishment: all these incidents do not trigger investigations, because Israeli military doctrine classifies them as lawful combat operations rather than potential war crimes.
Lack of transparency
The Israeli military provides information only when legally compelled, after maximum delay, and with vague data that is usually months out of date by the time it arrives.
When Israeli human rights organizations request information from military investigators, they encounter stonewalling, with generic statements claiming the system is “professional” and no substantive engagement with concerns, according to Cohen. The opacity extends across all levels of the system.
Getting even basic data requires sustained legal pressure. Yesh Din filed a freedom of information request on June 10, 2024, seeking data about law enforcement on soldiers. The military did not respond. After months of silence, Yesh Din hired a lawyer and threatened court action. Officials provided information “only after we finally hired a lawyer and threatened to go to court,” Cohen said. On April 20, 2025, more than 10 months after the initial request, the military responded. The data was updated only through August 15, 2024, meaning the information was already eight months old when delivered—”just to get over with the case,” Cohen said.
For another request regarding complaints, investigations, and indictments, Yesh Din spent months in back-and-forth exchanges before sending a letter through their lawyer. When the military still didn’t comply, the organization filed a court petition. Officials finally released information in July 2025 only after the court contacted the military for a response but that data was already a year out of date. The military avoided any sanction by the court by releasing the files.
The responses to separate freedom of information requests in January and April 2025 for data on criminal indictments filed finally arrived in September 2025. The delays are consistent across all requests.
“We never receive responses shortly after,” Cohen said. “It always takes a few months, sometimes more than that. It really depends on how much they are trying to get away or buy time.”
U.S. complicity
The United States, Israel’s largest weapons supplier, has internally acknowledged the scope of the problem. A classified October report by the State Department’s Inspector General identified “many hundreds” of potential Israeli violations of U.S. human rights law in Gaza.
Under the Leahy Law, the U.S. is legally barred from providing weapons or assistance to foreign military units credibly accused of gross human rights violations. U.S. officials told the Washington Post that, despite the Inspector General’s findings, the prospect for accountability for Israel’s actions were slim, “given the large backlog of incidents and the nature of the review process, which is deferential to the Israel Defense Forces.”
Under the legislation, a single objection from an official is normally sufficient to withhold assistance. Yet, for Israel, a special mechanism called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum requires consensus from a working group to determine whether a human rights violation has taken place.
Meanwhile, the U.S. also gathered intelligence last year that Israel’s military lawyers warned there was evidence that could support war crimes charges against Israel, according to Reuters, which “pointed to doubts within the Israeli military about the legality of its tactics that contrasted sharply with Israel’s public stance defending its actions.”
Despite this, since the launch of Israel’s genocidal assault, both the Biden and Trump administrations have not held Israel to account for human rights violations in Gaza.
A system built for impunity
While Israel’s military justice system yields close to zero accountability, the veneer of due process serves a strategic legal purpose. According to a leaked internal document from Israel’s Ministry of Justice, obtained through the DDOSecrets archive, the so-called investigations help to block international prosecutions even if they produce hardly any domestic prosecutions.
This strategy exploits the principle of complementarity in international law: domestic investigations can render cases inadmissible before international tribunals or foreign courts. The investigations don’t need to result in prosecutions or even meaningful accountability. They simply need to exist, allowing Israel to claim it has investigated allegations and therefore international courts lack jurisdiction.
The leaked document discusses investigations into allegations of violations committed by Israeli soldiers during the 2014 assault on Gaza—labelled Operation Protective Edge—and states that Israel considers it “of great importance” that the military publishes summaries of the MAG’s decisions.
“As our experience has demonstrated, complaints submitted to foreign countries, or international tribunals, often deal with events that occurred during this or that military operation,” the document says. “Our ability to point out immediately, as soon as the complaint has been filed, that the incident in question has been investigated, and refer to a public source detailing how the IDF’s judicial system examined the incident and the circumstances that led to its decision are invaluable.”
The investigation mechanism creates the illusion of accountability while systematically preventing it. Israel’s western backers and institutional allies often refer to the ongoing internal Israeli investigations as proof that allegations of abuse are being examined and cite them as evidence of a functioning justice system; these claims are also routinely reported on in media coverage as well.
Israeli human rights groups have long documented this pattern and have highlighted how the system is intentionally designed and operates in a way to evade accountability.
After Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2014, Yesh Din and B’Tselem announced they would no longer cooperate with military investigations or furnish evidence in the hope of leading to prosecutions. “The two leading Israeli human rights organizations in monitoring the investigations of offenses committed by security forces against Palestinians, find that after results of hundreds of investigations lead to the inevitable conclusion that the existing investigation mechanism is marred by severe structural flaws that render it incapable of conducting professional investigations,” Yesh Din and B’Tselem wrote in a joint report. “The existing apparatus is incapable of investigating policy issues or breaches of law by senior ranking military officials, and fails to promote accountability among those responsible. The figures show that the Israeli authorities are unwilling to investigate human rights violations committed by security forces against Palestinians.”
In a May 2024 report titled “The General Staff Whitewashing Mechanism,” Yesh Din analyzed Israel’s handling of three major assaults on Gaza over the course of a decade precedeing the current genocide. Of 664 incidents referred for review, 542 of them were closed without ever opening a criminal investigation. Only one resulted in an indictment.
In August, the conflict monitoring group Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) investigated publicly reported cases where the Israeli military announced it would conduct investigations into alleged war crimes or wrongdoing in Gaza earlier this year. They found that of the 52 such cases tracked between October 2023 and June 2025, 88% were either closed without finding fault or left unresolved.
“It’s very perverse,” Cohen said of Israel’s military justice system. The investigation process can take years, long after memories fade and evidence degenerates. Interviews conducted during the operational inquiry phase are confidential and cannot be used in subsequent criminal proceedings, which allows soldiers to coordinate stories before formal investigations begin.
This slow pace is intentional, according to Cohen. “It serves a purpose in a way. This is exactly what it’s supposed to do: it’s supposed to buy time,” she said.
The delays ensure that by the time criminal investigations might begin, if they begin at all, evidence has degraded and witnesses have scattered. “When investigations start so late after the events themselves, the chance of finding witnesses, the chance of finding evidence, the chance of being able to collect evidence and to indict people is almost non-existent,” Cohen explained. As she put it: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. This is exactly how the investigations are bound to fail to begin with.”
The purpose is to ensure soldiers remain immune from prosecution while creating the appearance of a functioning justice system. The inquiries and investigations don’t need to produce indictments or convictions. They simply need to exist. The few prosecutions that do move forwards often face fierce public opposition in Israel, and even the need for a veneer of accountability is now being increasingly challenged.
The gang rape case at Sde Teiman for which five Israeli soldiers were indicted is a case in point. The abuse that was caught on camera left the Palestinian detainee with broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a torn rectum. Yet after a number of reservists were detained over the incident, protests and riots erupted in Israel. Earlier this month, the MAG, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, resigned after acknowledging that her office was behind the release of the video. A week later, Tomer-Yerushalmi was arrested with Defense Minister Israel Katz accusing her of slandering the accused soldiers by spreading a “blood libel.”
According to Cohen, what was previously impunity “in practice” has now become a “concrete demand.”
“Some of the public and some members of the Knesset want to officially give immunity to soldiers, not just in practice,” she said. Even the pretense of legitimacy in investigating soldiers for alleged violations is now contested. “The right to even investigate such accusations against soldiers—even that is considered to be wrong today in the current atmosphere in Israel,” Cohen said. “The demand from the system is to provide impunity,” she added. “The goal is to give the soldiers immunity, not to find those responsible and hold them accountable for violations of international law. It’s the opposite.”
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