Israel military opens criminal probe into Hind Rajab killing

Israel’s military says it will open a criminal investigation into the killing of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl who died with relatives during Israeli operations in Gaza City in February 2024. According to The Independent, the Israel Defense Forces for the first time acknowledged that its troops fired on the family’s car, after earlier accounts described the child as trapped and in contact with the Palestinian Red Crescent while rescue permission was sought.

The decision is unusual less for what it promises than for what it implicitly concedes. The IDF said it had completed reviews of 150 incidents involving troop conduct in Gaza and had made decisions in five cases, a ratio that underlines how much of the war’s most contested violence is handled through internal screening rather than courtroom-grade scrutiny. The same announcement includes a second criminal investigation into the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics in May 2025, an incident in which Israeli troops opened fire on an ambulance and then on additional emergency vehicles that arrived, with phone footage and survivor testimony later challenging the military’s initial claim that the vehicles approached “suspiciously” without lights or signals.

In both cases, the public record has been shaped by non-Israeli institutions: families’ accounts, aid organisations, and video evidence that circulated outside military channels. The paramedics case, as described by The Independent, became harder to contain after footage showed emergency lights flashing and logos visible, forcing the IDF to back away from its first explanation. That pattern matters because it suggests that the trigger for formal investigation is not necessarily the gravity of an incident but the availability of verifiable material that makes a denial costly.

The selectivity is also explicit. The IDF said it would not open criminal investigations into three other high-profile attacks that killed aid workers from World Central Kitchen and Doctors Without Borders, The Independent reports. The same report notes that the military statement did not mention other prominent incidents it had previously pledged to examine, including strikes on a hospital in southern Gaza in August 2025 that killed five journalists.

Criminal investigations can, in theory, reassure allies and blunt international pressure by demonstrating a functioning accountability mechanism. In practice, the credibility of that mechanism rests on what it does with cases where evidence is messy, witnesses are unreachable, or operational secrecy can be invoked—precisely the conditions of urban warfare in Gaza. When an institution decides which deaths qualify for a police file and which remain a “review,” it is also deciding which claims will ever meet the threshold of adjudication.

Hind Rajab was found dead 12 days after her last contact with rescuers, alongside relatives and two medics who tried to reach her. The IDF is now asking its own military police to establish what happened after it says its troops fired on the car.