Israel Admits Its Soldiers Killed Hind Rajab, 5, and Family After Months of Denial

The Israeli military has admitted, for the first time, that its own soldiers opened fire on the car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and six family members in Gaza City in January 2024, killing everyone inside.

The admission, made in an official statement on Wednesday, directly contradicts what the Israel Defense Forces told the public for more than a year. The IDF had repeatedly denied that its troops were present near the site of the shooting. Independent media investigations, using satellite imagery and other evidence, had already concluded that Israeli tanks were in the immediate vicinity.

Hind died after a harrowing three-hour phone call with the Palestinian Red Crescent, pleading for someone to come get her as she sat trapped among her dead relatives in the family's Kia Picanto. The family had been trying to flee an Israeli ground offensive into Gaza City.

The Red Crescent dispatched an ambulance to reach her. Dispatchers stayed on the line until the connection cut out. The IDF confirmed Wednesday that its troops fired on that ambulance too, killing two paramedics. All the bodies, including Hind's, sat in the wreckage for 12 days before Israeli forces withdrew and rescuers could retrieve them.

The military said it is now opening a criminal investigation, citing what it called "alleged failures in the coordination of the movement of the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance." Criminal investigations into Israeli forces over Palestinian deaths in Gaza rarely result in convictions, a pattern that has drawn sustained criticism from human rights groups throughout the war.

A pattern, not an isolated case

Hind's killing was one of several high-profile civilian casualty incidents the IDF addressed in reviews published the same day.

The military also announced a criminal investigation into the killing of 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers near Rafah in March 2025. According to phone footage and the account of the lone survivor, soldiers lying in ambush shot at an ambulance retrieving casualties, then fired on a succession of marked emergency vehicles that approached. Troops then bulldozed the bodies and vehicles into a mass grave. UN and rescue teams could not reach the site for a week.

Jonathan Whittall, the UN official who helped recover the bodies, said the victims were killed "in their uniforms, driving their clearly marked vehicles, wearing their gloves, on their way to save lives."

The IDF initially claimed the vehicles had approached "suspiciously" without headlights or emergency signals. It abandoned that account after footage surfaced showing the convoy moving slowly with lights flashing and Red Crescent logos visible.

By contrast, the military said it would not open a criminal investigation into the April 2024 airstrikes that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, despite the group's insistence that it had coordinated the convoy's movements with Israeli forces and that its vehicles bore rooftop logos visible from the air. The IDF said it mistook people in the vehicles for armed militants and concluded commanders' decisions did not meet the threshold for criminal misconduct, though two officers were removed and three reprimanded. World Central Kitchen said it strongly disputes that account.

Taken together, the admissions mark a rare instance of the Israeli military conceding, in its own words, that its narrative to the public was false. What remains unresolved is whether any soldier or commander will face consequences.