Israel's Military Admits Troops Fired on Hind Rajab's Car and Rescue Ambulance in Gaza
The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) has acknowledged that its soldiers opened fire on a car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six family members in Gaza in January 2024, and has ordered a criminal investigation into the killing.
The admission reverses the IDF's repeated denials that its troops were present near the scene. The reversal comes more than two and a half years after the incident. On 29 January 2024, the family's Kia Picanto was struck as they attempted to flee a new Israeli offensive into Gaza City. All the passengers except Hind were killed outright. Hind survived the initial fire and spent three hours on the phone with the Palestinian Red Crescent, pleading for rescue. She died before help reached her. The bodies of all casualties were retrieved only 12 days later, after Israeli forces withdrew from the area.
The IDF has also admitted that its troops fired on the ambulance dispatched to rescue the child. Two paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), who had stayed on the line with Hind until contact was lost, were killed when their vehicle came under fire. The PRCS accused Israel of deliberately targeting the ambulance.
The criminal investigation was initiated specifically due to alleged failures in coordinating the Red Crescent ambulance's movement. The IDF's own Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism (FFAM) — an internal body that examines exceptional incidents during military operations — referred the case for criminal probe. The military police criminal investigation division will handle it. The IDF published its decisions on 19 August 2026 on its official website under a page titled "Criminal Investigation Decisions Regarding 5 Incidents," hosted within the Military Advocate General's Corps section of idf.il. The page describes fire directed at a vehicle of the Hamada family and at an ambulance, resulting in the deaths of nine persons, including the child Hind Rajab.
The IDF simultaneously published reviews into four other high-profile incidents in Gaza and announced a separate criminal investigation into the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and humanitarian personnel near Rafah in March 2025.
In April 2024, the US State Department said it would query Israel about the killing, noting the IDF's own claim at the time that a preliminary investigation had found its forces were not within firing range of the car. Media and other independent investigations had already uncovered evidence strongly suggesting nearby Israeli tanks were responsible. The distance between the IDF's initial position and its current admission is considerable, and the timeline itself raises questions about the threshold the military required before contradicting its own preliminary findings.
The broader context here is the mechanism itself. The FFAM process is designed to operate as an internal filtering layer — determining which incidents warrant referral to the Military Advocate General for criminal investigation. That the Hind Rajab case, which drew sustained international attention and a public query from Israel's closest ally, sat within this pipeline for over two years before reaching the criminal investigation stage speaks to the pace at which the system processes allegations of battlefield misconduct. The simultaneous publication of decisions across five incidents suggests an effort to batch outcomes rather than address them individually as they matured.
The case has also reverberated beyond Israel's military justice system. The Hind Rajab Foundation, a Belgium-based legal organisation named after the child, has pursued universal jurisdiction cases against individual Israeli soldiers traveling abroad. Universal jurisdiction is a legal principle holding that certain serious violations of international humanitarian law — the rules governing conduct in armed conflict — can be prosecuted in any country that is party to the relevant Geneva Convention protocols, regardless of where the alleged conduct occurred. The foundation brought a case against a soldier identified as Vagdani under this principle. Separately, Israel assisted a former soldier in leaving Brazil after Brazilian authorities opened an investigation based on a complaint brought by the foundation.
These two parallel tracks — the IDF's internal criminal investigation and external universal-jurisdiction litigation — create a dynamic in which the military's own investigative outcomes may bear on proceedings in foreign courts. An admission of fire and a formal criminal probe provide evidentiary material that did not exist when the IDF maintained its forces were not in the vicinity. Whether the criminal investigation reaches conclusions before further universal-jurisdiction cases advance is an open question, but the two processes are no longer running on entirely separate factual records.
