Israel's Military Now Says Its Soldiers Did Shoot at 5-Year-Old Hind Rajab's Car in Gaza
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Israel's military, has admitted that its soldiers opened fire on a car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six family members in Gaza in January 2024. The military has ordered a criminal investigation into the killing.
This admission reverses what the IDF had said before — that its troops were not in the area. The change comes more than two and a half years after the incident. On 29 January 2024, the family's small car, a Kia Picanto, was hit as they tried to flee a new Israeli military push into Gaza City. Everyone in the car except Hind was killed. Hind survived the first round of shooting and spent three hours on the phone with the Palestinian Red Crescent, a humanitarian aid organization, begging to be rescued. She died before help arrived. The bodies were not recovered until 12 days later, when Israeli forces left the area.
The IDF has also admitted that its soldiers fired on the ambulance sent to rescue the child. Two medics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society who had been on the phone with Hind until contact was lost were killed when their vehicle came under fire. The Red Crescent accused Israel of intentionally targeting the ambulance.
The criminal investigation was started because of problems in how the ambulance's rescue trip was coordinated. The IDF has an internal review team called the Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, which looks into unusual incidents during military operations. That team referred the case for a criminal probe by military police. The IDF published its decisions on 19 August 2026 on its official website, on a page titled "Criminal Investigation Decisions Regarding 5 Incidents." The page describes gunfire aimed at a car belonging to the Hamada family and at an ambulance, resulting in the deaths of nine people, including the child Hind Rajab.
At the same time, the IDF published reviews of four other high-profile incidents in Gaza and announced a separate criminal investigation into the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and humanitarian workers near Rafah in March 2025.
In April 2024, the US State Department said it would ask Israel about the killing, pointing out that the IDF's own early investigation had claimed its forces were not close enough to have fired at the car. Reporters and other independent investigators had already found evidence suggesting that Israeli tanks nearby were responsible. The gap between what the IDF said at first and what it is saying now is large, and the long wait raises questions about what it took for the military to change its own findings.
The broader context here is how the system works. The IDF's fact-finding process is meant to act as a filter, deciding which incidents are serious enough to be passed on for criminal investigation. The Hind Rajab case drew attention around the world and even prompted a public question from Israel's closest ally, the United States. Yet it sat inside this review process for over two years before reaching the criminal investigation stage, which tells us something about how slowly the system handles claims of wrongdoing by soldiers in combat. The fact that the IDF announced decisions on five incidents all at once also suggests it chose to group these results together rather than deal with each one as soon as it was ready.
The case has also spread beyond Israel's own justice system. The Hind Rajab Foundation, a legal organization based in Belgium and named after the child, has been using a legal principle called universal jurisdiction. This principle means that certain very serious crimes violate international humanitarian law — the rules that govern how wars should be fought — and can be prosecuted in any country that has signed the relevant Geneva Convention treaties, no matter where the crime happened. Using this approach, the foundation brought a case against a soldier identified as Vagdani. In a separate instance, Israel helped a former soldier leave Brazil after Brazilian authorities started an investigation based on a complaint from the foundation.
Now there are two processes running at the same time: the IDF's internal criminal investigation and lawsuits in foreign countries. The IDF's admission that its soldiers fired on the car and the ambulance provides evidence that did not exist when the military was still denying its troops were nearby. Whether the IDF's investigation finishes before more foreign cases move forward is unknown, but the two processes are no longer working from completely different sets of facts.
