By Rami Ayyub and Emily Rose
JERUSALEM, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Israel's military will open internal investigations over its troops' killings in Gaza of 5-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab in January 2024 and 15 emergency and aid workers in March 2025, it said on Wednesday, although rights groups said such probes rarely lead to convictions.
The military said the investigation decisions followed probes by its Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism. It released decisions regarding five incidents involving the deaths of Palestinians.
They included an examination of the killings of seven aid workers with the World Central Kitchen charity in April 2024. On that incident, the military said there was "no reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct that would justify the opening of a criminal investigation."
"For more than a thousand days, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has been conducting intensive combat across numerous fronts, carrying out a wide range of military missions in an exceptionally complex operational reality," the Israeli military said.
"As part of the IDF’s obligations under international law and Israeli domestic law, the IDF examines exceptional incidents that occurred during combat," the military said.
Israeli rights groups say that criminal misconduct investigations into Israeli troops over the killing of Palestinians rarely lead to convictions.
"Nearly zero indictments are served relative to the number of complaints of soldiers and commanders who commit offenses. In rare cases when commanders or soldiers are convicted, they receive ridiculously lenient sentences compared with the severity of the offence," a spokesperson for the Israeli rights organization Yesh Din said.
During Israel's offensive in response to an October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, Hind Rajab was pinned down in a car for hours, begging Palestinian medics by mobile phone to send help, while her aunt, uncle and three cousins already lay dead. When an ambulance arrived, contact with the girl and the rescuers themselves was lost. Twelve days later, the bodies of the girl, her relatives and two ambulance workers were recovered from the area.
A film about Hind Rajab's death won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award.
In March 2025, 15 emergency and aid workers from the Red Crescent, Palestinian Civil Defense and the United Nations were recovered from a grave in the sand in the south of the Gaza Strip, U.N. officials said at the time.
U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher said in a post on X that the bodies were buried near "wrecked & well-marked vehicles," adding: "They were killed by Israeli forces while trying to save lives. We demand answers & justice."
Israeli forces say they have never deliberately targeted civilians in the Gaza war. They say Hamas endangers such people's lives by using them for cover.
The Israeli military did not immediately comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers at the time. In a later statement to Reuters, it said that it had facilitated the evacuation of the bodies from the area, which it described as an active combat zone. It did not specifically respond to questions about why the bodies were retrieved from beneath the sand or why the vehicles were found crushed.
Eid Aziz, media director for the Red Crescent, told Reuters:
"More important than opening the investigation is that this should have been prevented. The Palestinian Red Crescent badge is protected by international laws, and the medical staff must be protected, especially as they execute their duties and humanitarian work.”
(Additional reporting by Pesha Magid and Ali Sawafta; Writing by Michael Georgy; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
