Israelis documenting crimes committed in Gaza
In recent weeks, mounting pressure on Karim Khan—the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC)—aimed at blocking the issuance of arrest warrants against Israeli officials for crimes committed in Gaza has come to light. The ICC prosecutor is currently sidelined. Indeed, on May 16, 2025, Mr. Khan was forced to temporarily step back from his duties pending the outcome of an inquiry into sexual assault allegations made by an ICC employee.
These pressures and threats have not let up since April 2024, when Karim Khan, a British citizen, received a call from UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron, warning that the United Kingdom would withdraw from the ICC if arrest warrants were issued against Israeli officials. On May 1, Anglo-Israeli lawyer Nicholas Kaufman, who represents former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte at the ICC, demanded during a meeting with Khan that the warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant be withdrawn, warning that otherwise both he and the ICC would be “destroyed.” Kaufman later confirmed the meeting with the prosecutor, claiming he had merely sought to “help him correct his mistakes,” denying any threats or Israeli conspiracy.
In July 2025, however, Dutch intelligence services confirmed that Israel and the United States were escalating threats against the ICC, reminding us that the court is “an attractive target for espionage and subversive influence by many countries, since their citizens may be prosecuted there.”
Whether or not these pressures succeed in stalling the ICC, against which new U.S. sanctions were announced last week, they do not stop the accumulation of solid, detailed evidence on crimes committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.
Two studies published in 2025—one in the medical journal The Lancet, the other by a team led by Michael Spagat, a world specialist on wartime mortality—concluded that the death toll reported by Hamas’s Health Ministry reflects only about 60% of actual violent deaths. They also noted that women and children represent between 52% and 53% of the total deaths. In June 2025, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported more than 100,000 deaths in Gaza.
By comparison, even in Syria, where armed groups resorted to extreme and systematic use of civilians as human shields, at times forcibly preventing populations from leaving, a practice Hamas has not employed, women and children represented only about 7% of total victims of the civil war. In Aleppo, despite an exceptionally brutal urban siege, widespread use of human shields, and the heaviest bombings of the conflict, women and children accounted for around 25% of victims—half the proportion seen in Gaza.
Within Israel, several human rights organizations have also published reports throughout the conflict denouncing crimes committed by the Israeli army in Gaza. Less publicized, however, are the efforts of other Israeli actors who are rigorously documenting these crimes as well. These courageous citizens contribute to ensuring that future trials, regardless of where they take place, will rely on evidence as irrefutable and impartial as can be. The same logic applies to the substantial evidence of crimes committed by Hamas against both Israeli and Palestinian citizens.”
Journalist Yuval Abraham, co-winner of the 2025 Oscar for Best Documentary for No Other Land and recipient of the 2024 Anna Politkovskaya-Arman Soldin Award for Courage in Journalism, has published several investigations for the Israeli investigative outlet +972 based on sources within the Israeli Air Force. These recently revealed that, according to the army’s own figures, the civilian death rate in the Gaza war stood at 83%, an unprecedented percentage in modern conflicts, unmatched since the genocide in Rwanda.
Abraham Yuval’s work also details deliberate attacks on civilians and strikes targeting rescue teams. His sources confirmed that some Israeli drones systematically targeted civilians. These findings were corroborated by British professor Nizam Mamode, a heart transplant specialist who returned from Gaza to testify before a UK parliamentary committee.
+972 also exposed that the Israeli army had used a civilian as a human shield, who was later executed. This practice has been investigated by numerous media outlets. One Israeli soldier described these human shields in Haaretz as a “sub-army of Palestinian slaves.”
Meanwhile, architect Eyal Weizman, director of the London-based organization Forensic Architecture and winner of the 2024 Right Livelihood Award, published an investigation into the machine-gunning of a family of seven in Gaza by an Israeli tank, followed by the destruction of the Red Crescent ambulance that came to their aid.
Haaretz has also published several investigations into war crimes committed in Gaza, including by its military correspondent Yaniv Kubovich, who collected soldiers’ testimonies about mass killings around the Netzarim corridor.
Another Haaretz investigation, based on accounts from soldiers stationed in Gaza, described orders to shoot anyone entering certain operational areas (so-called “kill zones”). These procedures were confirmed by journalist Oren Ziv—recognized by the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv for his reporting—in another investigation for +972.
War correspondent Nir Hasson also reported in Haaretz testimonies from soldiers who said they had been ordered to fire on civilians waiting for humanitarian aid. According to his investigation, the Israeli army uses gunfire, including heavy weapons and artillery, as a tool for crowd control.
All these accounts, originating directly from Israeli sources, are corroborated by other reference organizations. The UK NGO Airwars, which specializes in analyzing aerial bombardments worldwide, published a report showing that the war in Gaza represents an unprecedented case in terms of crimes committed from the air by the Israeli military, even compared with Russian bombings in Syria or Ukraine.
All this evidence is being methodically archived and analyzed by members of Israeli civil society. Among them is Lee Mordechai, professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Princeton PhD, who has systematically compiled since the beginning of the conflict an exhaustive list of sources and evidence on his regularly updated website. By transforming scattered fragments into a lasting corpus, Lee Mordechai is building a body of probative memory useful for both investigations and the judgment of History, considering this his “civic duty.”
Nobody seems able to stop atrocities from being committed on both sides in this war. But many men and women, including in Israel, are risking their lives to ensure these crimes are thoroughly documented. Their work will not bring back the victims, but it keeps alive the hope that justice will one day be served.
The article first appeared in French on Le Temps on the 23rd of August 2025
Image: IDF Forces Leave Gaza. Wikimedia Commons.
