Israel's military on Wednesday admitted that its soldiers opened fire in January 2024 on a car trying to flee Gaza City following Israel's evacuation orders. The car was carrying 5-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab and six of her relatives. They were all killed, as were Palestine Red Crescent Society medics dispatched to rescue them. The Israeli military said it would also investigate the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics whose bodies and crushed emergency vehicles were recovered from a mass grave in Rafah in March 2025. It made no mention of thousands of other incidents where Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces.
"This seems to be nothing more than political theater," says Sharif Abdel Kouddous, the Middle East and North Africa editor at Drop Site News. He was a correspondent on the Al Jazeera Fault Lines documentary The Night Won't End that investigated the killings of civilians in Gaza by the Israeli military, including Hind Rajab.
"Israel's internal investigations into the criminal conduct of its own soldiers … can't be regarded as credible mechanisms for accountability," says Abdel Kouddous. "They instead function primarily to shield Israel from international tribunals or prosecution abroad."
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