This week the IDF’s Military Advocate General released the findings of its largest single accountability review since October 7: 150 investigations into “exceptional operational incidents” during the Gaza war, handed up by the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism. Five of the highest-profile cases got public rulings. Criminal investigations by the Military Police were ordered into two of them: the January 2024 killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab and six family members, and the March 2025 killing of 15 Rafah rescue workers, where Golani reconnaissance soldiers fired on ambulances and a UN vehicle over several hours. Three other cases, including April 2024’s World Central Kitchen strike that killed seven aid workers, were closed after prosecutors found operational failures but no criminal threshold crossed. Two officers were already dismissed and three commanders reprimanded in that incident back when it happened.
Yet despite the investigations clear language, a lot of international coverage this week flattened “criminal investigation ordered” into “IDF admits war crimes” in the Hind Rajab and Rafah cases, as though opening a probe were the same as a finding of guilt. Opening a Military Police investigation means the facts warrant a closer look, nothing more, and treating that as a verdict is either careless reporting or intentional framing. What deserved the headline instead: out of more than 150 reviewed incidents, spanning thousands of strikes over more than two years of fighting, only two crossed the threshold for a criminal investigation. That ratio is the actual story, and almost nobody wrote it that way.
No outside body forced this review into existence. The IDF built its own mechanism, ran 150 cases through it, and where the facts warranted, opened criminal investigations into its own soldiers, including reversing an earlier denial in the Hind Rajab case. A soldier or commander who breaks the chain of command and the law gets investigated, not protected. Compare that to the terror organizations we’re fighting, who have never once looked inward at their own conduct. Mistakes happen in a war zone. What makes Israel’s army the most moral in the world is what happens after the mistake: we look at ourselves harder than anyone else is looking at us.
The people insisting Israel doesn’t take its own conduct seriously are staring at 150 completed investigations and still finding a way to be unsatisfied. This isn’t content built for a TikTok audience, it’s the opposite, a slow legal process most people will never see the inside of and won’t find remotely interesting. Israelis support it anyway, not because it wins us a news cycle abroad, but because it’s about whether our own army can look itself in the mirror.
