Transcript (en)

Israel's military is to open internal criminal investigations over its troops killing of a Palestinian girl and in a separate incident the killing of 15 paramedics. Five-year-old Hinn Rajab was killed alongside six members of her family in a car while trying to escape the fighting in Gaza City in January 2024. 15 aid workers including eight Palestinian Red Crescent medics were killed in March 2025 and their bodies found in a mass grave. The IDF previously said it had mistakenly identified a convoy of aid workers as a threat after an investigation by Sky News, which proved the ambulances were clearly marked when Israeli troops opened fire on them. But the Israeli military have said they will not launch a criminal investigation into the April 2024 attack which killed seven world central kitchen aid workers. British private security contractors John Chapman, James Henderson and James Kirby were all killed in that attack. Well in a statement regarding the world central kitchen attack the Israeli military say there was no reasonable suspicion of criminal misconduct that would justify the opening of a criminal investigation. For more than a thousand days the IDF has been conducting intensive combat across numerous fronts carrying out a wide range of military missions in an exceptionally complex operational reality. As part of the IDF's obligations under international law and Israeli domestic law, the IDF examines exceptional incidents that occurred during combat. Let take you live now to the Middle East and speak to our Middle East correspondent Adam Parsons who as you can see is live in Jerusalem for us this hour And some very high and very significant incidents we talking about here Adam I mean, is this a sense of Israel trying to confront some of its critics by opening or not opening these investigations? I think that's certainly part of it. Israel has had a lot of criticism for not only its conduct in Gaza, but for the fact that in Gaza and, frankly, in the West Bank and in other areas, it is seen as having allowed its military to carry out attacks without then investigating them, or when there are investigations, inevitably them leading to soldiers, to leader commanders, being exonerated. Now, these attacks that it has investigated in this announcement today are some very, very high-profile incidents, including those that it is pushing forward into criminal investigations and those that it says, effectively, it will cease now. So, for instance, the World Central Kitchen attack that you referenced there is not going to be pushed into a criminal investigation. I'm sure that there will be considerable anger within that charity, within the charity sector widely, that they see that as having been a prima facie attack on cars that were marked as having been there on pursuit of NGO activities. Nothing to do with the military, nothing to do with Hamas, that these were clearly charity workers. But I think that the greater focus now probably is on the investigations that are going to take place.