The IDF’s major formal update on its war crime investigation into the current war that was meant to be resealed sometime in February will be significantly delayed for months, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
It is still unclear what factors delayed the update. Some of these could pertain to the fact that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir replaced Herzi Halevi, that Israelis were more confident in the military’s ability to handle legitimacy issues, given the backing Israel has received for the war from US President Donald Trump’s administration, or that there was a return to an ongoing war in Gaza.
On January 30, sources with knowledge told the Post that a major new update was only weeks away.
The last significant update published by the IDF on its war crimes probes was in August 2024 after Maj.-Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the IDF’s chief military advocate general, first started to provide public updates in May 2024.
Temporarily, there seemed to be new support for issuing an update after the January 19 ceasefire with Hamas, with the idea being that Israel could avoid the concern of probe decisions impacting officers still in the field of an ongoing war.
Also, Halevi’s January 21 announcement that he would publish probe results concerning the October 7 massacre before he resigned on March 6 collectively marked a distinct turning point in the conflict.
More than 1k reviews expected
When the update is, in fact, published, the Post understands that it is expected to note the number of total preliminary operational reviews of up to over 1,000 cases that were conducted by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yoav Har-Even’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism (FFA).
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 ones.
Of those 85, over 50 relate to the wrongful deaths or abuse of detainees, many relating to problems earlier in the war at the Sde Teiman makeshift detention facility.
Six IDF soldiers and officers have already been indicted in two separate cases of alleged abuse of detainees.
Some other cases involve allegations of wrongful killing in the field, while others entail either theft of Palestinian property or the illegal taking of Palestinian weapons without declaring them to the proper IDF authorities.
In comparison, the 2014 Gaza conflict FFA Mechanism carried out around 300 preliminary reviews and 32 full criminal probes.
How to address widespread Gaza destruction
One major issue that the IDF is likely to confront from the International Criminal Court and other critics is that there has been little systematic addressing of the question of the widespread destruction of Palestinian homes and buildings in Gaza.
At the start of the war, a wide range of top and lower-level sources, including people in the field, told the Post that many residences and buildings were booby-trapped with explosives both for force protection and in order to make progress against Hamas forces. Many such structures simply had to then be bulldozed.
ISRAELI CRITICS always raised questions about the extent of Israeli bulldozing and about whether this was always carried out for a concrete military advantage against an ambushing Hamas force or whether it was sometimes connected to a form of collective punishment or a method of deterrence against Hamas and other Israeli enemies.
As for deterrence, bulldozing may have been used as a way to encourage enemies to think twice before invading the Jewish state in the future.
There certainly have been some cases where IDF soldiers demolished structures without authorization, and there have even been a few cases where these soldiers were reprimanded.
However, there was a change to the criticism in October-November 2024, when critics accused Israel of causing much larger destruction in northern Gaza as a way of pressuring Hamas into a hostage deal.
The "General's Plan"
This was in line with aspects of the General’s Plan, a plan by senior former IDF officials designed to bring Hamas to its knees much more rapidly, given that a year of war had not achieved the return of many hostages.
Israel never formally admitted to such a plan and has also not formally defended the high-level of destruction during that period, nor is it clear how much that destruction is being probed.
This week, the NGO Breaking the Silence published a report claiming that the IDF started an even more aggressive effort, partially during the ceasefire and partially since hostilities were renewed on March 18-19, to remove large portions of Gazan property to enlarge an Israeli security perimeter around the Gaza Strip.
According to a satellite analysis cited in parallel to the report, the IDF is accused of leveling over 6,200 buildings in Gaza since January in a one-kilometer-wide buffer zone.
The Post has repeatedly requested explanations from the IDF and has been promised a response, but by press time, no response has been received.
ONE OF the complications for Israel from an international law standpoint, and with the ICC, is that if Jerusalem views the security perimeter as self-defense and does not regard destroying Palestinian property in that zone as a crime, there may be no probe, such that the issue may also go unaddressed in the broader update when that comes out.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration so far has backed Israeli actions regarding the security perimeter to avoid future potential invasions.
When the broader update does come out, it will also likely include final conclusions regarding the infamous mistaken attack by the IDF, which killed seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers on April 1, 2024, IDF sources said.
However, in the event that the conclusions of the WCK case are not included in the update, IDF sources have said it was likely that a separate report would be issued about the case around the same time that the more general update was published.
The WCK case may also take on greater significance after the IDF admitted this past weekend to killing 14 International Red Crescent aid workers accidentally and potentially mishandling the return of their bodies – though their bodies were eventually returned to the UN.
Zamir has promised an expedited review of the incident.
Errors of judgement found in IDF strike on WCK convoy
By Sunday, the IDF had already completed a rapid operational review that found such serious judgment errors in the IDF strike on the WCK convoy that two senior commanders, IDF Nahal Brigade Chief of Staff Col. (res.) Nochi Mendel and an unnamed senior targeting commander were dismissed for ordering the strike.
This occurred even though IDF officers thought that Hamas was mixed into the picture.
Further, IDF Nahal Brigade Commander Col. Yair Zuckerman, Division 162 Commander Brig.-Gen. Itzik Cohen, and Southern Command chief Maj.-Gen. Yaron Finkelman 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 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.
Moreover, IDF sources said that a further, even more comprehensive update would 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.
Due to the specificity of South Africa’s charges, the IDF’s July update is expected to include extensive new factual findings.
Case prioritization
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, 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 media and international judicial bodies gave the attacks on the bakeries heavy coverage – the 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 that 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 these bakeries from being protected civilian locations to military targetable ones – or that they were struck accidentally while the IDF was targeting other terrorist targets nearby.
To date, the IDF, in general, the FFA Mechanism, and the legal division in particular, 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.
