The IDF will publish a major formal update on its war crimes probes relating to the current war in the coming weeks, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
The last significant update published by the IDF on its war crimes probes was in August 2024 after IDF Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi first started to provide public updates in May 2024.
It was unclear exactly why the latest update was being issued now, though the January 19 ceasefire with Hamas may avoid the concern of probe decisions impacting officers in the field of an ongoing war, and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi’s recent announcement that he will publish probe results into the October 7, 2023 disaster before he resigns on March 6, collectively mark a distinct turning point in the conflict.
Included in the impending publication, the Post understands, is expected to be the update that the number of total preliminary operational reviews by the Fact Finding Mechanism of Maj. Gen. (res.) Yoav Har Even is up to over 1,000 cases.
Within those 1,000 reviews, as of December 1, the Post had previously reported that the IDF had already opened around 85 criminal probes and around 220 disciplinary probes. In comparison, the 2014 Gaza conflict Fact Finding Mechanisms carried out around 300 preliminary reviews and 32 full criminal probes.
It is also possible that the publication will include final conclusions regarding the infamous mistaken attack by the IDF which killed seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers on April 1, 2024, said IDF sources.
In the event that the final conclusions of the WCK case are not included in the update, IDF sources said it is likely that a separate report will be issued about the case around the same time that the more general update is issued.
By April 6, the IDF had already competed a super-fast operational review that found such serious judgment errors in the IDF strike on the convoy, even though IDF officers thought that Hamas was mixed into the picture, that two senior commanders, IDF Nahal Brigade Chief of Staff Col. Nochi Mendel and an unnamed senior targeting commander, were dismissed for ordering the strike.
Further, IDF Col. Nahal Brigade Commander Yair Zukerman, Division 162 Commander Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, and Southern Command Chief Maj. Gen. Yaron Finkleman were all censured for failing to have clearer standing orders prohibiting such a controversial strike.
To date, these were the most high-ranking commanders to be fired or censured for events relating to the current war, other than the events of Hamas’s October 7, 2023 invasion itself.
In July 2024, the Post reported that Tomer-Yerushalmi was seeking extensive additional information and evidence to evaluate any potential criminal probe level questions that go far beyond an initial operational review.
In addition, IDF sources said that a further even more comprehensive update will be issued by the IDF and the State of Israel by the end of this coming July to respond to allegations made by South Africa in October 2024 against the Jewish state in the genocide allegations case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
That progress in the ICJ case comes after multiple interim rulings by the ICJ between January and May 2024 that placed pressure on Israel regarding its conduct of the war, but never ordered a full halt.
Due to the level of specificity of South Africa’s charges, the IDF’s July update is expected to include extensive new factual findings.
Already in June 2024, the Post had learned that certain other cases were being prioritized to get earlier answers, and it is possible that either the upcoming update, or if not, in the July 2025 update, that a final ruling will be issued on probes into the IDF attacks on two bakeries in Gaza, one in October 2023 and one in November 2023.
The attacks on the bakeries were given heavy coverage by the media and international judicial bodies – the International Criminal Court (ICC) is probing Israelis’ conduct during the war in parallel to the ICJ proceeding.
International judicial bodies and critics of Israel have presented the attacks on the bakeries as potential evidence of a sustained push by Israel to starve out Gazans, one of the war crimes the ICC has accused Israelis of committing.
The Post understands that there is a high probability that the conclusions will either emphasize that there were terrorists in the bakeries when they were struck – which could convert them from protected civilian locations to military targetable locations – or that they were struck accidentally while the IDF was targeting other terror targets nearby.
IDF sources have pointed out to the Post that throughout the conflict, other than the early weeks of the war when Israel was still repelling Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel and was mass bombing parts of Gaza to prepare them for invasion, the military has facilitated humanitarian aid trucks into the Strip.
While the volume of trucks has gone up and down depending on periods of time where the war heated up, many periods have seen 200-300 trucks of aid entering per day, and Spring 2024 and other periods saw up to 500 trucks entering per day.
To date, the IDF generally, and the FFM and the legal division specifically, have taken flak for how slowly the IDF’s narrative has come out about controversial cases, especially as the ICC already issued arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant by November 21.
Moreover, the ICC has threatened to issue arrest warrants against Israeli soldiers as well if the IDF does not carry out its probes promptly, and a growing number of global media outlets have published longer articles having extensively researched a large number of controversial attacks by Israel without the IDF having provided anything but generic responses.
In addition, on January 5, an IDF soldier had to suddenly flee Brazil when Israel learned that Brazilian officials might seek to arrest him for alleged war crimes.
However, IDF sources said that the US and England have sometimes taken up to five or six years to reach decisions about complex battlefield cases, such that the length of complexity of the current war could easily justify some cases not having decisions reached for up to even eight years.
Under the September 2015 government Ciechanover Commission recommendations (named for the late former foreign ministry director-general Joseph Ciechanover), the IDF Military Advocate General must make at least initial legal decisions about whether to indict or close a case even in the most complex alleged war crime cases by 21 months after an incident, which for some early war incidents would be no later than July.
Following the 2014 Gaza conflict in which the IDF killed around 2,100 Palestinians, about 50% civilians, the IDF legal division had issued five reports by August 2016, a bunch of them before the 21-month deadline, and some around the deadline.
There was one exception, the IDF report on the worst incident of killing dozens of Palestinian civilians on “Black Friday” of the 2014 Gaza conflict, which was issued four years after the episode. But this was the exception to the rule.
IDF sources said that the current war dwarfed the 2014 conflict both in terms of the number of incidents to research and the amount of legal challenges the IDF and other government ministries are having to confront – leaving less time to publish public updates.
Returning to the Brazil incident, IDF sources said that if soldiers do not publicize their trips on social media, that even if various anti-Israel groups may be trying to file complaints against them in dozens of countries, they will likely have few issues.
Also, sources emphasized that a complaint is much less serious than a decision by an official judicial or prosecutorial body to pursue charges – and that it is early in the game to know which countries may later get to such a more serious stage.
Finally, the Post published back in July 2024 that Tomer-Yerushalmi had supported a state inquiry into the government’s war-making decisions in terms of compliance with international law and that such an inquiry might have blocked or frozen the arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.
For a mix of diplomatic and political reasons, Netanyahu decided against such an inquiry at the time, and Israel is currently appealing the ICC arrest warrants against him and Gallant.