LONDON: Israel has hidden or failed to announce the results of investigations into more than 254 incidents in which its military was accused of killing or injuring civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, the BBC has found.
The failure to disclose the results of incident probes — some almost three years old — is part of a well-documented tactic through which the Israeli military seeks to minimize attention toward controversial incidents in the public eye until interest has waned, one researcher said.
The British broadcaster’s investigation wing, BBC Verify, deployed purpose-built artificial intelligence tools to comb through more than 60,000 news reports and documentation surrounding hundreds of events in which the Israel Defense Forces were accused of harm since Oct. 7, 2023.
Manual verification was then used to gather 300 cases that the IDF claimed it was investigating.
Just 28 of those incidents resulted in an outcome being published on the IDF website, while for a further 18 events, it was “unclear if the investigation has been concluded,” the BBC said.
After the findings, the IDF was approached about each case several times but only responded with information surrounding two incidents, which it said were under review.
Out of the 254 incidents identified by BBC Verify, 158 took place in Gaza, 48 in the West Bank and 32 in Lebanon. A further 16 took place in Israel or within IDF detention facilities. At least one person was reportedly killed in more than 200 of the cases.
Some of the earliest unresolved cases in which Israel has yet to provide an outcome date back to 2023 and 2024, including a strike on a Gaza school in the latter year that killed least 93 Palestinians, including six women and 11 children.
The Israeli military typically responds to accusations of harm by declaring that an incident is being investigated, “looked into,” “reviewed,” “checked” or “examined.” However, “often, that is the last that is heard about a case,” BBC Verify said.
The IDF has escalated a number of investigations to the level of criminal investigation, apparently due to intense public scrutiny, such as in the killing of Hind Rajab and of 15 Palestinian Red Crescent emergency staff who were shot more than 100 times, allegedly at close range.
The results of Israeli military investigations are not routinely released to the public, including those resulting in criminal investigation of troops.
A number of investigations that have been released relate to Israeli hostages in Gaza who were allegedly killed as a result of IDF operations.
In cases such as the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers and four Medecins Sans Frontieres staff in two separate attacks, the IDF has said it did not find a basis for, or reasonable suspicion, to open a criminal investigation.
Despite repeated requests, the IDF has failed to provide a transparent breakdown of the status of the 300 investigations identified by BBC Verify.
Dan Owen, a researcher at Yesh Din, which has been monitoring military investigations since 2006, told BBC Verify that the IDF typically tries to “prolong” investigations and “stretch out these processes to the point where people forget and people don’t care about them.”
A professor of international law at the University of Oxford, Janina Dill, said a party to armed conflict has a responsibility to investigate under the Geneva Conventions.
She added: “That’s the absolute clear bottom line. There are also guidelines for investigation, endorsed by the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross), so they have some authority. And they emphasise promptness, thoroughness, impartiality.”
In one case months into the war on Gaza, two women were killed by Israeli troops in the enclave’s sole Catholic church, in an event that the IDF later said was “under review.”
Nahida and Samar Anton, mother and daughter, were shot dead by Israeli snipers inside the grounds of the Holy Family church, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.
After the killings, BBC Verify contacted the IDF about the report and was told that Israeli troops had been operating against a “Hamas threat” they had seen “in the area of the church.” The IDF said it was “conducting a thorough review of the incident.”
In September last year, the BBC approached the IDF for an update but was told the killings were “still being reviewed.”
In its latest communication, almost three years since the killing of the Antons, the IDF again said the incident is under review.
Dill, also a co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, told BBC Verify: “Three years into this operation, some of these investigations should have been concluded. Israel has relied heavily on the argument that it is a rule-of-law country to delegitimise attempts by the international community to investigate.
“If we have cases of documented abuse that either don’t get investigated or the investigations get stuck, and we have reasonable grounds to believe that they get kicked into the long grass, then that would undermine the narrative that Israel is fully capable of taking care of providing accountability.”