JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s military announced Wednesday its first criminal investigations into the conduct of troops in Gaza, focusing on the murders of five-year-old Hind Rajab and her family and 15 Palestinian paramedics. The military said it would not investigate three other attacks that killed aid workers from World Central Kitchen and Doctors Without Borders. It said it had completed reviews of 150 incidents of troop conduct in Gaza and had made decisions on all five cases. Chef José Andrés, founder of US-based World Central Kitchen, condemned the decision on X as “wrong and painful.” The investigations involve murders that sparked a strong international outcry. Hind was trapped in a vehicle with her murdered relatives, calling for help by phone before she too was killed in February 2024. After the shooting of the 15 doctors in March 2025, troops dragged their bodies to a mass grave. Israel’s campaign in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people, including tens of thousands of women and children, according to the territory’s Health Ministry. Human rights groups and UN commissions have said the campaign amounts to genocide and that Israeli forces have committed a litany of war crimes, including the indiscriminate use of force and deliberate killings of civilians. Israel denies accusations of genocide and war crimes and says it is targeting Hamas after its October 2023 attack on southern Israel. It blames Hamas for the civilian deaths because the militant group operates in populated areas of the small, overcrowded strip. Israeli officials maintain that their justice system can address any violations committed by their troops, but human rights groups say soldiers are rarely held accountable. Wednesday’s statement did not mention many other high-profile killings that Israel has pledged to investigate, such as its attacks on a hospital in southern Gaza that killed five journalists in August 2025, including Mariam Dagga, a visual journalist who freelanced for The Associated Press and other news organizations. Hind’s grandmother, also named Hind Rajab, told the AP by phone that the Israeli investigation into his murder is not enough. “An international investigation is required to uncover the truth and hold all those responsible accountable,” he said. “We ask for justice, not only for Hind, but for all the children of Gaza.” In Wednesday’s statement, the military admitted to shooting at the car carrying the 5-year-old girl, four of her cousins and her uncles as they fled an Israeli invasion of Gaza City. As gunfire surrounded them, the girl’s cousin, 15-year-old Layan Hamada, called the Palestinian Red Crescent paramedic center and told them that her family had been killed. Seconds later, more gunshots were heard and Layan’s screams stopped, according to the Red Crescent recording of the call. Subscribe to Morning Wire: Our flagship newsletter breaks down the day’s biggest headlines. Palestinian paramedics sent an ambulance to rescue Hind and remained on the line with her until contact was lost. Hind, his five relatives and two ambulance doctors were found dead 12 days later. The army admitted on Wednesday that troops had fired on that ambulance, killing the two doctors. Dyab Abou Jahjah, director of the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, told Al-Jazeera that he considered the military investigations a “farce aimed at covering up the guilty rather than convicting them.” The Palestinian Red Crescent also insists on an international investigation, said Raed al-Nims, the organization’s spokesman in Gaza. “Israeli measures are not enough,” he told the AP. A docudrama film about Hind’s death, “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” won international awards and was nominated for an Oscar. The 15 doctors had been trying to reach the victims. In the killing of the paramedics, Israeli troops fired at an ambulance headed to recover victims of an Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah, then fired at other emergency vehicles that came looking for the first, according to phone footage and the only survivor of the shootings. Fifteen doctors and emergency personnel from the Red Crescent and Gaza Civil Defense were killed. Troops then bulldozed the bodies and vehicles and buried them in a mass grave. UN and rescue workers were only able to reach the site a week later to unearth the bodies. The Israeli military initially said it opened fire because vehicles were “suspiciously advancing” toward troops without headlights or emergency signals. But it backtracked after footage emerged, showing the teams driving slowly with their emergency lights on and logos visible. A deputy commander was ordered to resign over the murders. “We are not obliged to prove the truth because it is already proven to the whole world,” Eid Azizi, spokesman for the Palestinian Red Crescent, told the AP in a phone call. “We should not have reached this point if they had respected and followed international humanitarian law.” Israel will not criminally investigate World Central Kitchen attack The military said it had decided not to conduct a criminal investigation into the April 2024 airstrikes that hit a convoy of World Central Kitchen vehicles and killed seven personnel. The aid group, which distributes food in Gaza, said at the time that it had coordinated with the army on the movement of the convoy. The vehicles, which had the group’s logo on their roofs visible from the air, were left incinerated and destroyed. Wednesday’s military statement said the people in the vehicles were wrongly identified as armed Hamas operatives. But he concluded that the commanders’ decisions “did not raise reasonable suspicions of criminal conduct.” At that time, two officers were removed from their positions and three others were reprimanded. World Central Kitchen responded in a statement, saying the military’s account of the attack was false, “conflating different timelines and events, muddying history and shifting blame.” He called for an independent investigation. The military also decided not to take criminal action for the murders of four Doctors Without Borders employees in two separate cases in November 2023 and February 2024. What will happen next? Military investigators will now resume investigations and present their findings to military prosecutors. The military attorney general can then decide to continue investigating, charge the soldiers involved, or decline to press charges against them. Any action will take a long time, if it comes to fruition at all, said Tal Steiner, head of the Israeli human rights group HaMoked. Indictments are very rare and convictions even rarer, he said, recalling only one soldier who had spent time behind bars since October 7, 2023 for alleged abuse of Palestinian prisoners. That soldier was jailed for seven months under a plea deal from June 2025. “It is very rare for soldiers accused of harming Palestinians to even go to court … and even rarer for them to receive severe punishment,” Steiner said. Only 0.17% of all military investigations launched during three operations in Gaza between 2014 and 2022 led to a prosecution, according to an analysis by Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. The number of war victims continues to rise. The war began on October 1. On January 7, 2023, when Hamas-led militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in southern Israel and kidnapped another 251. Israeli attacks have continued in Gaza since a ceasefire agreement went into effect in October, killing at least 1,270 people, according to the Health Ministry. The ministry, part of the Hamas-led government, maintains detailed records of victims that are generally considered reliable by U.N. agencies and independent experts. It does not give a breakdown of civilians and militants, but says women and children make up about half of the dead. ___Magdy reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Erin Cunningham in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
