What Israel's First Gaza Criminal Probes Are Actually For

On Wednesday, Israel's military announced something it had never done in nearly three years of war: criminal investigations into its own troops' conduct in Gaza, one into the killing of 5-year-old Hind Rajab and six of her relatives, another into the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics whose bodies were found in a mass grave in Rafah, according to the AP¹. On Thursday, thirty settler families moved into Kadim, a West Bank settlement Israel itself evacuated in 2005, escorted by the finance minister and celebrated by the regional settler council as a "historic milestone"⁴. That same Thursday, the leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, and Norway issued a joint statement calling Israel's newest settlement tenders "unacceptable"⁸ and demanding Israel "retract these plans immediately"⁷. The United States signed nothing.

So the question practically asks itself: is Israel's diplomatic cushion, the combination of unconditional American backing and European reluctance to impose material costs, finally cracking? I spent the week pulling on that thread, and my conclusion is that the week's events are better read as the cushion working than as the cushion failing. The probes and the condemnations are real, and they are new in form. But when you trace what each mechanism actually does, both function as pressure management: they absorb outrage at the point where it is cheapest and release nothing at the point where it would bind.

Start with the probes, because they are the strongest evidence for the optimistic reading. The Military Advocate General, the Israeli military's top legal officer, ordered the Military Police to open criminal files after an internal fact-finding review found what the army called failures in coordinating the movement of the Red Crescent ambulance sent to rescue Hind, per the IDF's own account³. A criminal file is categorically different from the operational reviews Israel has used to close most wartime cases; it can, in principle, produce indictments of named soldiers. And there is a genuine argument that even a bad-faith probe creates risk for Israel, because the International Criminal Court operates on complementarity: it only takes cases when national systems prove unwilling or unable to genuinely prosecute. A criminal investigation that visibly goes nowhere becomes evidence of exactly that unwillingness.

But the base rates here are brutal. Freedom-of-information records obtained by Drop Site¹¹ show that in the first 18 months of the war, during which more than 50,000 Palestinians were killed, the Israeli military filed exactly three criminal indictments for Gaza-related offenses and secured one conviction, in a looting case. In the five years before the war, Yesh Din's monitoring¹² found that of 862 complaints about soldier offenses against Palestinians in the West Bank, 1.5 percent produced indictments, and the probability that a soldier would be prosecuted for killing a Palestinian was 0.4 percent. Opening investigations has never been the bottleneck in this system. Convicting anyone is. And the announcement itself carried the tell of curation: the military said it had reviewed 150 incidents, reached decisions in five, and declined to open criminal probes² into the killings of World Central Kitchen and Doctors Without Borders aid workers. Two criminal files out of 150 reviewed incidents, in the two cases with the most devastating public evidence (Hind's final phone call was recorded), is not a system discovering accountability. It is a system selecting the minimum credible offering.

The timing sharpens the point. One day before the probes were announced, Washington sanctioned the ICC's president and a senior trial lawyer¹³, bringing the tally, by the court's own count, to nine of its eighteen judges, both deputy prosecutors, and its former prosecutor. Read together, the two moves form a coordinated two-layer defense of the same clients: the United States attacks the court's personnel from outside while Israel supplies the court a complementarity argument from inside. The probes are not the beginning of accountability; they are the paperwork of a legal shield.

The settlement track tells the same story with less subtlety, because here the condemnation and the condemned act ran on the same calendar day. The joint statement targeted E1, a roughly 12-square-kilometer tract between Jerusalem and Ma'ale Adumim where Israel has now tendered construction that would, as France 24 reports⁹, nearly sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank and break the territorial spine of any Palestinian state. It said nothing about Kadim, where settlers were at that moment unloading trailers under military escort. Kadim matters more than another tender: it was the last of four northern West Bank settlements dismantled under Ariel Sharon's 2005 disengagement, and its repopulation completes the formal reversal of the only withdrawal Israel ever executed in the West Bank. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stood on the hilltop and declared that "twenty-one years after the crime of expulsion from northern Samaria, we have completed the correction,"⁶ while vowing 19 more settlements in the area, per AFP⁵.

Could the European statement still mark something new? The advocates of that view point to the business warnings (Western governments cautioned companies in May¹⁰ against bidding on settlement tenders) and to the live EU debate over banning settlement-goods imports outright, which the bloc's foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said was "the option that got the most support"¹⁵ among member states in July. That is genuinely more than followed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 in 2016, when a unanimous-minus-US declaration that settlements violate international law produced a decade of uninterrupted expansion. I take the point seriously, and it is why I would not call this week pure theater.

But then look at who is blocking the enforcement that the statement implies. The trade ban stalled at the July 13 Foreign Affairs Council over a legal-basis dispute: treat it as trade policy and it passes by qualified majority; treat it as a sanction and it needs unanimity. Germany, alongside Czechia¹⁴, insists on unanimity, which is a polite way of insisting on a veto. Ten days later EU ambassadors met again and, per Euronews¹⁵, found no majority for any option at all. Germany and Italy signed Thursday's condemnation. The same two governments are the reason the condemnation has no teeth. When the author of the statement and the author of the deadlock are the same actor, the statement is not pressure on Israel; it is pressure relief for domestic audiences at home.

Meanwhile the ground truth keeps moving in one direction. Human Rights Watch reported Thursday¹⁶, citing UN data, that settler violence has fully or partially displaced 107 Palestinian communities since January 2023, that attacks are running at 6.6 per day in 2026, the highest rate ever recorded, and that settlers had killed at least 15 Palestinians by late July, on pace to break the record. Peace Now counts 248 new outposts under this government, 65 of them this year. Every instrument the allies have already deployed, statements, individual settler sanctions, labeling rules, has coexisted comfortably with those numbers.

I can describe what would change my judgment, and it is not another statement. It is an indictment of an officer, not a private, in the Hind Rajab case, or a settlement-goods regulation actually adopted in Brussels over German objection. Until one of those happens, the honest reading of this week is choreography: a probe calibrated for The Hague, a condemnation calibrated for domestic voters, and a hilltop ceremony calibrated for the only audience whose reaction Israel's government still fears, which is its own coalition. Hind Rajab's grandmother, reached by the AP this week, needed one sentence to say what the data took me two thousand words to establish: "An international investigation is required to uncover the truth and hold all those responsible accountable."¹ She understood that the investigation she was offered exists precisely so that the one she asked for never happens.