The IDF has closed dozens of alleged war-crimes cases arising from the 2023-2024 period of the Israel-Hamas War, The Jerusalem Post can disclose exclusively.
Publication of the details of the case closures was extensively delayed by fears that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) would abuse such information in their politicized anti-Israel agendas.
Generally, much more progress has been made for the 2023-2024 period than for more recent incidents, which did not occur until 2025.
Sde Teiman
Many of the cases closed relate to the deaths of allegedly as many as 98 detainees at the IDF’s Sde Teiman detention facility or at other detention facilities earlier in the war.
These cases constitute a significant number of about 100 criminal probes that the IDF legal division has opened into soldiers’ conduct.
Not every death requires a probe, as many detainees were apparently mortally wounded on the battlefield, dying of their wounds shortly after being brought to Sdei Teiman for medical attention.
The figure of 100 is just a small proportion of as many as 3,000 preliminary reviews of alleged war crimes. As of press time, the IDF had not provided a breakdown of which preliminary review cases had been referred for potential criminal consideration by the IDF legal division, which had become full criminal cases, and which had leapfrogged past the operational review stage directly into being criminal probes.
It is also possible that additional indictments will still be filed in the Sdei Teiman cases.
If so, it will be interesting to see how the complex domestic and international politics of the issue, resulting in two indictments, including one that took Israel by storm, will be impacted by the new developments.
ICJ’s March response
Regarding the ICJ, the Post has learned that Israel’s response, which is due on March 12, to South Africa’s genocide claims against it are in the process of being detailed in a legal brief about 1,000 pages long, with an additional 4,000 pages or more of exhibits.
While the brief is one of the largest, if not the largest, international law and war legal defense documents Israel has ever produced, the charges being confronted only relate to 2023-2024.
South Africa has not yet submitted a detailed attack on the IDF’s conduct in 2025. It is expected that South Africa will file an update this spring or summer, and Israel likely will need to respond by the spring of 2027.
There are concerns among Israeli lawyers about the genocide charges, not only due to exaggerated public statements made by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, but also resulting from statements made near the start of the war by more authoritative defense figures.
World Central Kitchen/Islamic Red Crescent
Regarding the April 1, 2024, World Central Kitchen incident in which the IDF mistakenly killed seven humanitarian-aid workers, there has been an extensive delay in announcing the final results of the criminal probe, although some IDF senior officers involved were immediately relieved of command or censured as part of an operational probe.
As far back as the summer of 2024, the Post was told by IDF senior legal sources that a decision could be coming soon. This was repeated in January 2025 by informed sources and again last week.
There is no question that out of the large, high-profile cases, this one is furthest along in terms of the ability of the IDF legal division to render a legal decision.
Beyond that, although there are a number of purely legal reasons for the delay, there could also be greater diplomatic concerns about additional ICC warrants being issued against the soldiers involved, some of whom were publicly named by the IDF as being relieved of command or censured.
Additionally, there are wider implications, since those killed in the incident were citizens of six different countries, and all of those countries have kept the issue alive as a serious problem in their diplomatic interactions with Israel.
Although the initial analysis of the incident by the operations probe portrayed it as a series of errors and certainly not intentional, there could also be concerns about various lower levels of potential criminal culpability.
Regarding the March 23, 2025, Islamic Red Crescent incident in which the IDF mistakenly killed as many as 15 humanitarian aid workers, this is one of the few 2025 cases that is very advanced in the probe process.
While many 2025 cases are still in the preliminary stages, this probe has already been sent to IDF Military Advocate-General Maj.-Gen. Itay Offir for adjudication.
It is unclear when he will issue his decisions, given that he only took office last November 27 with little advanced notice, after his predecessor abruptly resigned in a separate scandal relating to the Sdei Teiman cases.
Gazan bakeries
In October-November 2023, there was a series of IDF strikes that hit bakeries in Gaza, which are not only usually defined as civilian locations, but were also a major source of food for the wider public given the war situation.
Because of ICJ secrecy rules, the IDF says it cannot publicize the specifics of its responses to the various incidents (although it could have decided to provide a paraphrased summary).
But overall, the responses are expected to argue that in some cases, the bakeries had been taken over by Hamas, and in light of terrorist fighters being located there, they had become legitimate military targets.
In other cases, the bakeries may not have been the target and may not have even been hit directly by the IDF. There may have been a misjudgment by the IDF about how far the force of the strikes would spread, with unintended and indirect, but still deadly, impact on the bakeries.
Even in such a situation, Israel would argue before the ICJ that the unintended and tragic harm to the bakeries and those potential civilians inside did not actually cause any kind of starvation in Gaza.
Prior to its October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre, Hamas had stocked up with food and supplies in Gaza in preparation for an expected Israeli counterstrike (although its preparations were meant to last for weeks or months, not for two years).
<strong>Jabalya 2023</strong>
In October 2023, the IDF allegedly killed as many as 125 Palestinian civilians in multiple airstrikes in Jabalya in northern Gaza. Some of those incidents are among the ones that the operational preliminary probes first started to look into early in the war.
Recent inquiries by the Post to the IDF about the status of the probes and about why the results of those from so early in the war had not yielded any public information did not lead to any new information on them.
Previously, however, IDF sources had told the Post the purpose of one operation was to kill a senior Hamas official, and it appears that the IDF had factored in a small number of civilian casualties from the one location he was inhabiting. The collapse of the house that was struck led to the additional collapse of the tunnel below it, which in turn destroyed a range of nearby structures, the sources said.
In such cases, an IDF senior lawyer previously told the Post, they would need to look at questions of proportionality based on what the IDF could have reasonably been expected to know before the operation, not what the result turned out to be in the light of information it did not yet possess.
From a military vantage, since the goal was to wrest control of Gaza from Hamas, the value of eliminating Hamas tunnels was far higher than ever before. Eliminating tunnels was also important for ongoing force protection during maneuvering and operations, since there was an ongoing invasion, the IDF lawyer said.
Expected harm to civilians is notoriously hard to estimate, but an IDF senior lawyer previously told the Post the IDF had learned lessons from a Gaza conflict disaster in May 2021.
In that incident, large numbers of civilians were killed by accident due to the unexpected collapse of a tunnel under a residence, causing the entire block of residences to collapse.
But even after learning lessons, the height, length, and width of a given tunnel may be other than that estimated as a result of intelligence, the IDF lawyer said, adding that the tunnel’s solidity or its rickety nature and the materials it was made from may also differ from IDF estimates.
In addition, if Hamas hides explosives around the tunnel in an attempt to trap and kill IDF ground forces, and those cause additional unexpected explosions and the collapse of other residences nearby, the IDF cannot be held accountable, the IDF legal adviser said.
Blowing up skyscrapers to destroy mere surveillance
Last September, the IDF reinvaded Gaza City, having invaded it multiple times earlier in the war. This time, however, the IDF’s goal was to permanently take over the area, and part of the relevant strategy involved was the destruction of areas where Hamas might hide out, including large buildings not previously targeted.
In many cases, the IDF’s or the Defense Ministry’s public statements indicated that skyscrapers that were destroyed were allegedly targeted because they contained Hamas surveillance equipment.
Those statements did not mention the elimination of any imminent Hamas threats, nor whether ground troops could have destroyed the surveillance equipment without destroying the whole building.
The Post has not received a comprehensive answer explaining these issues.
But one possible answer suggested by informed sources is that part of the broader operation had involved clandestine movements to locate Israeli hostages. In that case, immediate maintenance of operational secrecy could have justified the need to quickly eliminate potential surveillance of Israeli forces.
Likewise, the Post did not receive a clear response regarding statistics provided by the IDF, which cumulatively appear to show a significantly worse ratio of killed Palestinian civilians compared with combatants in 2025 versus in 2023-2024, as well as similar allegations from some IAF sources.
It was unclear whether the lack of response was because the 2025 probes are still in their preliminary stages, or whether there were other reasons, including that some of the statistical data may be disputed.
GHF-IDF 2025 incidents
There was a similar lack of information regarding the status of probes into the May-October 2025 incidents with Palestinians, related to the GHF or to IDF soldiers supervising the nearby perimeter of the GHF food-aid sites.
The Post has learned that the IDF’s view is that most of the incidents of Palestinian civilian deaths, of which the IDF or the GHF are accused, were manufactured by Hamas or exaggerated.
The Post has also learned that there were a series of incidents, likely in single digits, in which IDF soldiers probably did mistakenly kill single-digit numbers of Palestinian civilians.
Collectively, this would clear the IDF of responsibility in the immense number of deaths claimed by UN agencies – some claiming more than 800 and some far more – but possibly in the low dozens.
These probes, the Post understands, are still at the operational stage and have not yet reached the IDF legal division.
This is both because they occurred recently, during the second half of 2025, and they are being reviewed as part of a more comprehensive review of the entire GHF-IDF saga, including additional layers of analysis that go beyond a single case evaluation.
ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan
Although ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan has been suspended from his post since October 2024, IDF officials are still concerned that he may make a comeback, given that he still has not been formally forced to resign.
Regardless of Khan’s fate, his deputy, Nazhat Shameem Khan (Fiji), has made it clear that she is advancing cases against Israelis at least as seriously as Khan did.
Allegedly killing civilians in Gaza post-ceasefire
On January 31, the IDF allegedly killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in the process of assassinating a couple of Gaza terrorists, even though Hamas had not succeeded in killing any Israeli soldiers and had only possibly tried to when some of its fighters emerged from a tunnel.
How does the IDF justify such a seeming lack of balance, given that the war ended in October 2025?
Even post-ceasefire, Israel and Hamas are locked in an armed conflict under the laws of war, the IDF has said.
At a certain point, IDF operational commanders define how important a target is militarily, even if that target is not shooting at the IDF at that particular moment. This can make an attack legal even in the absence of an open broader war.
A separate question regarding the IDF being able to defend its attack legally is whether the attack could be said to violate the ceasefire terms, which are a stricter standard than the minimum requirements of the laws of war.
This is less of a legal question, however, and more of a question for diplomacy between the United States, Israel, and the other parties to the ceasefire.