According to Drop Site’s investigation, files show that when cases enter the system, “they remain there indefinitely under review with no visible endpoint.”
The Israeli army has filed only three criminal indictments against its soldiers for Gaza-related offenses during the first 18 months of its genocidal onslaught on the enclave, according to a report by investigative news outlet Drop Site.
This is according to six responses to freedom of information requests filed by Israeli rights group Yesh Din between January 2024 and April 2025, the report said.
It noted that only one of the indictments resulted in a conviction, “while the two other cases are still pending.”
🚨NEW: There Have Only Been 3 Criminal Indictments Against Israeli Soldiers for Gaza War Crimes in First 18 Months of War@umerzai_b reviewed internal Israeli records for Drop Site News and finds a justice system designed to provide impunity. https://t.co/PYdZF31Aqr
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) November 13, 2025
The report highlighted the case of five-year-old Hind Rajab and six members of her family who were killed along with two rescue workers by Israeli forces in Gaza City on January 29, 2024.
Facing pressure, the Israeli military initially announced an investigation, but a month later said “an initial probe suggested its troops were not present in the area at the time of the incident despite satellite images and other evidence proving they were,” Drop Site reported.
Even though the case was transferred to the General Staff Fact-Finding Assessment mechanism, the report said, “no further findings were ever released and no one was charged.”
‘Indefinitely Under Review’
According to Drop Site’s investigation, files show that when cases enter the system, “they remain there indefinitely under review with no visible endpoint” and that investigations “are opened very rarely, and they almost never conclude.”
Human rights groups, it said, argue that “the system is designed as a smokescreen,” to give “the impression of due process while allowing Israeli soldiers to commit crimes against Palestinians with blanket impunity.”
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Allegations of military wrongdoing “enter a filtering system overseen by an internal agency known as the office of the Military Advocate General (MAG).”
Drop Site found that as of August 15, 2024, the Israeli army had logged only 95 formal complaints about incidents during the military operation in Gaza. However, two of the “individual” complaints alone referenced “hundreds of incidents” alleging harm to international aid workers and their facilities, the report stated.
MAG decides the direction a complaint can follow, with a fraction sent directly to criminal investigation, “most incidents are first routed through an operational review conducted through the FFA mechanism—a body established in 2014.”
The FFA is staffed by high-ranking officers “for the investigation of exceptional incidents” and to conduct preliminary inquiries into allegations of violations of Israel’s laws of war, Drop Site said.
Cases Awaiting Decisions
Of the 1,456 “exceptional incidents” referred to the FFA mechanism by August 15, 2024, the report noted, “just 11 were completed, with the rest remaining under review” with no final decision, according to the freedom of information documents.
“Of the 11 completed FFA mechanism inquiries sent to the MAG, nine were still awaiting a decision on whether criminal investigations would be pursued, and two had resulted in orders to open criminal investigations by Israel’s Military Police Criminal Investigation Division (MPCID),” the report stated.
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“We’re not surprised at all by the low number of indictments,” Yesh Din’s data coordinator Noa Cohen told Drop Site, adding that the few indictments that do occur typically result from “a random action or a coincidence or a specific pressure.”
The report emphasized that Israeli soldiers have posted thousands of videos and photos on social media “documenting their own war crimes,” including the shooting of unarmed civilians and abuse of detainees, looting, and arson.
It stressed that more than 2,500 cases of self-documented evidence of violations were compiled in a database by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit. This has, however, yielded next to nothing in terms of accountability.”
US Complicity
The Drop Site report also highlighted the US, as Israel’s largest weapons supplier, having “internally acknowledged” the scale of the problem.
It cited a classified October report by the State Department’s Inspector General as having identified “many hundreds” of possible Israeli violations of US human rights law in Gaza. In addition, it referenced a Reuters report that the US gathered intelligence last year that Israel’s military lawyers warned there was evidence that could support war crimes charges against Israel. This “pointed to doubts within the Israeli military about the legality of its tactics that contrasted sharply with Israel’s public stance defending its actions,” the report added.
The report noted that in August, the conflict monitoring group Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) investigated “publicly reported cases where the Israeli military announced it would conduct investigations into alleged war crimes or wrongdoing in Gaza earlier this year.”
The group found that of the 52 such cases tracked between October 2023 and June 2025, “88% were either closed without finding fault or left unresolved.”
Sde Teiman Case
In the case of the Sde Teiman rape incident caught on surveillance cameras, Yesh Din’s Noah Cohen said what was “previously impunity ‘in practice’ has now become a ‘concrete demand.’”
The army’s chief advocate, Maj Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, resigned after admitting that she had approved the release of the footage to the media. She was arrested a week later with Defense Minister Israel Katz accusing her of spreading “blood libel” against the Israeli soldiers accused of the rape and assault.
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Cohen said even the right to “investigate such accusations against soldiers—even that is considered to be wrong today in the current atmosphere in Israel.”
She added: “The demand from the system is to provide impunity.”
(PC, Drop Site, Anadolu)
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