Israel finally admits it fired on Hind Rajab's car, two and a half years after her death

Israel's military has, for the first time, admitted it opened fire on the car carrying five-year-old Hind Rajab and her family in Gaza City. The admission comes two and a half years after she died, and only after her name became one of the most recognized symbols of civilian death in the war.

The military said Wednesday it would open a criminal investigation into the killing of nine people on 29 January 2024, including Hind. It cited "alleged failures in the coordination of the movement of the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance" as the trigger for the probe, which will run through the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division, the body that handles internal allegations of wrongdoing.

That framing is narrow. It addresses the ambulance strike, not the initial attack on the family's vehicle, and it stops short of calling what happened a strike on civilians at all.

What happened to Hind

Hind's family was fleeing intense Israeli attacks in Tel al-Hawa when they split up, some on foot, Hind and relatives in a car. Israeli forces opened fire on the vehicle, killing several family members instantly. Hind survived and called the Palestine Red Crescent Society for help. Her 15-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh, told the family by phone that tanks were 500 meters away before the line went dead.

Hind then took the phone herself. In an audio recording later released by the Red Crescent, she can be heard pleading, "I'm scared of the dark, come get me," as gunfire rattles in the background. Her mother, Wissam Rajab, has said Hind told her she was cold, hungry and afraid.

After coordinating the rescue with the Israeli army, the Red Crescent dispatched paramedics Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun. Their ambulance was then shelled. Both medics were killed. Twelve days later, searchers found the bodies of Hind, six family members and the two paramedics.

The Red Crescent has said Israeli forces "deliberately targeted the ambulance upon its arrival at the scene" despite the prior coordination.

A shifting story

At the time, Israel's military said it had no forces in Tel al-Hawa. Multiple media outlets reported Israeli tanks were in the area. The military later published, then quietly deleted, a press release stating it had "conducted raids on terror targets" in Tel al-Hawa, among other locations, undercutting its own denial.

Hind's death drew global condemnation, and a documentary, The Voice of Hind Rajab, was nominated for an Oscar this year.

Selective accountability

Alongside the Hind Rajab announcement, the military said it is opening a criminal investigation into the killing of 15 aid workers in Tel al-Sultan in March 2025. But in three other high-profile cases, it concluded there was "no reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct": the killing of two Doctors Without Borders staff in November 2023, two more in February 2024, and seven World Central Kitchen employees in April 2024.

That pattern, an investigation opened here, closed there, with little public explanation of the standard applied, is the part of this story that outlasts any single case. Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded over 174,000, according to figures cited in reporting on the war. The military's internal investigative process has yet to produce a public accounting that matches the scale of those numbers.