Two and a half years after the deadly 2024 Gaza City incident that claimed the life of five-year-old Palestinian child Hind Rajab, alongside eight other people including two rescue paramedics, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has issued a historic first admission that its forces opened fire on the vehicle carrying the young girl and her family. The announcement Wednesday also confirmed that a full criminal investigation will be launched into the January 29, 2024 killings, marking a rare shift from the military’s previous denials of wrongdoing in the high-profile case that sparked global outrage.
The tragic sequence of events began on that January day, when an initial Israeli strike on the vehicle carrying Rajab and her relatives killed multiple family members immediately. The five-year-old survived the initial attack, and in a harrowing, now-infamous phone call with the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), she begged medics to come rescue her as gunfire and tank movements echoed around her in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City.
After PRCS coordinated a safe passage for a rescue mission directly with the IDF, an ambulance carrying two experienced paramedics, Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, was dispatched to extract the injured child. Shortly after the ambulance arrived at the scene, it too was hit by Israeli shelling, killing both rescue workers on board. Twelve days after the attack, search teams recovered the bodies of Rajab, six of her family members, and the two dead paramedics from the destroyed vehicles.
PRCS has repeatedly accused Israeli forces of deliberately targeting the rescue ambulance even after full coordination for the mission was completed. In previous interviews, Rajab’s mother Wissam Rajab described the chaotic circumstances that separated her from her daughter the day of the attack: as the family tried to flee intense Israeli bombardment in the area, poor weather conditions led Wissam to place five-year-old Hind in a car with her uncle, his wife, and their children, while the rest of the family fled on foot. After hearing sustained gunfire near the vehicle, family members contacted PRCS to report the car was under attack.
Wissam Rajab initially believed everyone in the car had been killed, until a first call from her 15-year-old cousin Layan Hamadeh confirmed the two girls were still alive but trapped and injured. “Hind and I are wounded, and all my family is dead, I don’t want to die. Please call an ambulance to save us. I’m scared. The tanks are 500 metres away from me,” Hamadeh told her, before the line went dead. When the family reconnected, only Rajab was alive on the line. “I’m alive, but Layan was martyred. Mum, I’m afraid, they are all dead. Come and get me,” the five-year-old said. In the released audio of her final call with PRCS medics, Rajab’s pleas can be heard clearly over background gunfire: “I’m scared of the dark, come get me. Don’t leave me, I’m cold, hungry, and afraid.”
Hind Rajab’s death quickly circulated across global media, sparking widespread international condemnation of Israeli forces’ actions. A documentary film about her killing, *The Voice of Hind Rajab*, was nominated for an Academy Award earlier this year, cementing the case’s place in global public discourse.
In its Wednesday statement, the IDF said the decision to launch a criminal probe was made over “alleged failures in the coordination” of the PRCS ambulance movement. The investigation will be led by the Military Police Criminal Investigation Division, the IDF’s primary body for examining claims of military misconduct.
This admission marks a reversal of the IDF’s original position, which claimed that Israeli forces were not even present in the Tel al-Hawa area at the time of the killings. Multiple independent media reports contradicted that claim, documenting Israeli tanks operating in the neighborhood that day. Shortly after the incident, the IDF issued a statement saying it had “conducted raids on terror targets” in Tel al-Hawa alongside other areas of Gaza, but later deleted the press release from its official website.
Alongside the new probe into Rajab’s killing, the IDF also announced Wednesday that it would open a separate criminal investigation into the March 2025 killing of 15 aid workers in Tel al-Sultan, in southern Gaza. However, the military closed three other high-profile cases of aid worker deaths, concluding there was “no reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct.” The closed cases include the killing of two Doctors Without Borders (MSF) employees in November 2023, two additional MSF workers in February 2024, and seven World Central Kitchen workers killed in an April 2024 strike.
Since the start of Israel’s large-scale military campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Palestinian health authorities report that more than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 174,000 have been injured, the vast majority of them civilians.