Israel opens first criminal investigation into Gaza killing of Hind Rajab and 15 paramedics

Israel's military said on Wednesday that it is opening its first criminal investigations into the conduct of Israeli troops during the Gaza war, targeting two of the conflict's most widely documented civilian killings: the shooting deaths of five-year-old Hind Rajab and six members of her family in January 2024, and the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers whose bodies were later found bulldozed into a mass grave in Rafah in March 2025.

The announcement, issued by the Military Advocate General's Corps, marks the first time in nearly two years of fighting that Israel has ordered a criminal probe, rather than an internal command review, into the killing of civilians in Gaza. It also marks the first time the military has publicly acknowledged that its own soldiers fired on the car carrying Hind Rajab, after eighteen months of denying troops were in the area.

What the military found

According to the Military Advocate General's Corps, its review covered roughly 150 "exceptional incidents" flagged during the war for possible violations of the law of armed conflict. Decisions were announced on five of them. In two — the Rajab case and the Rafah paramedics case — the corps ordered the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division to open a full criminal probe. In three others, involving the deaths of aid workers from World Central Kitchen and Doctors Without Borders, the military advocate general concluded there was no basis for criminal proceedings.

On Hind Rajab, the military's statement said "the findings of the examination indicate that IDF troops fired at a vehicle that was approaching them" while it was "travelling contrary to the advance notice that had been published in an announcement by the IDF Spokesperson to residents of the area." The statement also pointed to what it called failures in coordinating the movement of a Palestine Red Crescent Society ambulance that was dispatched to rescue the child after the initial shooting — an admission that two medics died in a second strike while trying to reach her.

The car in Tel al-Hawa

Hind was travelling with her uncle, aunt and four cousins in a black car fleeing an Israeli push into Gaza City's Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood on January 29, 2024, when the vehicle came under fire. Her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh, reached Red Crescent dispatchers by phone as the shooting began, then was killed while still on the line. Hind, then five, stayed on the call for close to three hours, repeating that she was scared and asking for help, according to the recording later released by the Palestine Red Crescent Society. An ambulance sent to reach her was struck as it approached; paramedics Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun were killed inside it. When rescue teams finally reached the scene twelve days later, they found Hind and all six relatives dead in the car, alongside the two medics in the burned-out ambulance beside it. The full account is documented on Wikipedia's record of the case, drawn largely from the Red Crescent's own call logs and Israeli military statements issued at the time.

For a year and a half, the military's position was that it had no forces in the immediate area when the shooting occurred. Wednesday's statement reversed that.

Bulldozed into a mass grave

The second case under investigation concerns the deaths of eight Red Crescent workers, six Gaza Civil Defense personnel and one United Nations staff member in Rafah's Tel al-Sultan district on March 23, 2025. Troops fired on a convoy of marked ambulances, a fire truck and a UN vehicle responding to an earlier strike; when colleagues went looking for the missing crews, several of their vehicles were also hit. The bodies and the wrecked vehicles were buried by military bulldozers and were not recovered until March 30, a week-long delay that is documented in detail in the record now compiled of the Rafah paramedic massacre.

Israel's military initially said the vehicles had approached without headlights or emergency signals and were treated as a threat. That account was contradicted the following year by cellphone video, recovered from one of the dead paramedics, showing the ambulances clearly marked and lit with flashing emergency signals as they were fired on. A military review completed in April 2025 attributed the killings to "professional failures" and led to the removal of a deputy battalion commander, but stopped short of ordering a criminal investigation — a step Wednesday's announcement now takes.

• 150 "exceptional incidents" reviewed by the Military Advocate General's Corps
• 5 cases decided; 2 referred for criminal investigation, 3 closed without charges
• 15 rescue workers killed in the Rafah convoy attack on March 23, 2025
• More than 73,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 2023, and roughly 1,300 more since the October 2025 ceasefire, according to the territory's health ministry

Who is affected

The immediate parties are the surviving relatives of Hind Rajab and the families of the fifteen rescue workers, most of whom have spent between eighteen months and two and a half years without a formal criminal process. More broadly, the decision touches the Palestine Red Crescent Society and Gaza's Civil Defense agency, whose staff have died in Israeli strikes at a rate that has drawn repeated condemnation from the United Nations humanitarian office, and it is being watched closely by international bodies examining Israel's conduct of the war, including bodies weighing separate war-crimes allegations. Israeli soldiers who served in the units involved are also affected: a criminal investigation, unlike an internal command review, can result in indictment, court-martial and prison time, a prospect that rights lawyers in Israel describe as exceedingly rare in practice.

"They were killed in their uniforms. Driving their clearly marked vehicles. Wearing their gloves. On their way to save lives." — Jonathan Whittall, head of the UN humanitarian affairs office in the Palestinian territories, describing the Rafah paramedics' deaths

A guarded response

Reaction to the announcement, first reported by the Washington Post, was largely skeptical. Hind Rajab's grandmother said through relatives that "an international investigation is required to uncover the truth and hold all those responsible accountable," arguing that an internal Israeli process could not be trusted to deliver it. The Hind Rajab Foundation, a group formed to pursue legal cases against Israeli soldiers abroad, said it had "no confidence" in the investigation. Eid Azizi, a spokesman for the Palestine Red Crescent Society, said the organisation was not seeking to establish facts that were already settled: "We are not obligated to prove the truth because it is already proven to the whole world." Rights groups in Israel were similarly restrained. Tal Steiner of the Israeli human rights organisation HaMoked noted that "it's very rare that soldiers accused of harming Palestinians even go to court," pointing to a long record of internal military inquiries that closed without charges.

Not all reaction was critical of the process itself. Some commentators in Israel argued that the announcement, however overdue, represented a genuine break from past practice, since it was the military's own fact-finding mechanism, rather than outside pressure, that produced the referral. The chef and aid worker José Andrés, whose World Central Kitchen lost seven staff to an Israeli strike earlier in the war, called the decision not to prosecute in the aid-worker cases "wrong and painful," even as he welcomed scrutiny of the Rajab and Rafah killings.

What happens next

Military police investigators will now gather evidence and interview soldiers involved in both incidents before handing their findings to prosecutors in the Military Advocate General's Corps, who will decide whether to file charges, continue investigating, or close the cases without indictment. Israeli officials have not given a timetable, and NPR's reporting on the announcement noted that similar investigations opened earlier in the war have taken well over a year to reach even a charging decision. Human rights lawyers note that convictions of Israeli soldiers for killing Palestinian civilians have historically been rare, and that even when charges are filed they have often been for lesser offenses than the facts of a case might suggest.

The Rajab and Rafah cases are also being cited in submissions to international bodies examining Israel's conduct in Gaza, and lawyers for the victims' families have said they intend to pursue parallel avenues, including cases in foreign courts under universal-jurisdiction statutes, regardless of how the domestic investigations conclude. For the families and for Gaza's community of first responders, who have lost hundreds of colleagues over the course of the war, Wednesday's announcement was received less as a resolution than as the start of a process whose outcome remains uncertain.