Israel's willingness to investigate its own, even if a case is later dropped, highlights a key distinction from adversaries who would never hold their own accountable for killing Israelis or Jews.
In many senses, the IDF's first official alleged war crimes report regarding Israeli soldiers' conduct during the Israel-Hamas War was too little too late.
The report was released on Wednesday. From a pro-Israel perspective, for nearly three years Israel and the IDF have not been fully putting forth their narrative into the public sphere to defend themselves against genocide and other allegations.
Sure, there have been generic defenses about Hamas using human shields and the IDF trying to evacuate civilians away from the fighting (both of which are true), but at some point militaries have to address the specific allegations of distinct incidents.
For Israeli critics, the nearly three-year delay has solidified their conclusion that the IDF and Israel are not interested in true justice, but in a fancy whitewash process.
And yet, after both of those criticisms, the report was an important start.
The IDF only gave the public an update on five of its 150 criminal probes, not to mention over 3,000 disciplinary probes.
But the results in the five probes defied some critics' expectations that there would be no deeper probes at all.
In two of the cases, IDF soldiers and commanders will be questioned under criminal caution, and may yet be indicted.
Critics are correct that indictments against Israeli soldiers for killing Palestinians are even rarer than criminal probes.
But they are not nonexistent, with at least half a dozen such cases in the decade before October 7.
And every time the IDF questions soldiers, not to mention commanders, under criminal caution, it creates major waves among the political class and general population.
Even when the IDF legal division later may reach a conclusion that an indictment would not succeed, and the case should be dropped, the simple act of interrogating Israel's own is exactly what differentiates it and other democracies from many of the Jewish state's enemies, who would never dream of putting someone on trial for killing Israelis/Jews.
While critics say that absent an indictment or even a conviction, there is no deterrence for soldiers to be more careful, in many cases the criminal interrogation itself, which leaves the soldiers and those around them in doubt for an extended period, achieves a deterrent effect.
Next, critics will compare the IDF legal division's performance in this war negatively versus in past wars.
They will note the IDF legal division opened 32 criminal probes following the 2014 Gaza War when Israel killed over 2,100 Palestinians, at least 50% civilians.
Further, they will claim that after killing over 70,000 Palestinians – even if 25,000-30,000 were Hamas or killed in internal Palestinian fighting – 150 criminal probes is not even close to adequate.
They will denigrate the more than 3,000 disciplinary probes, claiming they are jokes that can be ignored completely.
There is no easy answer to some of these charges.
If Israel tried to open the same ratio of criminal probes per Palestinian killed during this war compared to the 2014 Gaza conflict, there would be over 1,050 criminal probes.
And no one would claim that fewer mistakes were made in this war, with a massive number of highly documented errors which led to the tragic killing of a sizable number of Palestinians.
In some cases, the IDF has admitted that tank shells hit the wrong target, in others that mistaken intelligence indicated that all civilians had left an area where dozens were still hiding and killed by aerial bombs, and in yet others where missiles hit one Hamas location but that location turned out to be linked to an unknown underground tunnel which then unexpectedly toppled an entire block of civilian homes on their residents.
In other words, there is no debate that a large volume of errors were made.
The question is how those errors are understood.
Pro-Israel advocates will note that these three years of war can be broken down into literally millions of smaller operations and fights versus Hamas, house-to-house, tunnel section to tunnel section. They will add that even if more mistakes were made than in any prior war, the volume of mistakes was still small compared to the number of battles.
In terms of time, some decisions were made earlier, but still have not been publicized, with The Jerusalem Post exclusively publishing back on February 8 that the IDF legal division had already delved into and closed dozens of cases, but was withholding publication.
Advocates will correctly note that at times the environment of criticism which enveloped Israel, even in October 2023 before the stains of blood of the 1,200 slaughtered Israelis were cleaned, has been intense and grossly disconnected from facts and context. This led Israeli officials to often hold back on publicizing their decisions out of fear that critics would abuse anything they put out.
Once the International Court of Justice took the spurious genocide charges against Israel seriously and the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against between two and five senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli hesitance to publicize information which could be abused became even stronger.
Moreover, Israeli legal officials would note that it was not easy to pick a time to publicize their results when the government has been trying to fire the Attorney-General, overhaul the court system, and threatened to go after IDF legal officials who would dare to charge soldiers.
The Sde Teiman saga is a case in point: Israeli legal officials started with good intentions but ended up with the worst of all worlds.
In July 2024, then IDF legal division chief Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi faced hundreds of Israeli civilians, including some government Knesset members, who literally broke into an army base to try to free arrested IDF prison guards, who were being questioned for allegedly beating a Palestinian detainee.
At one stage, Tomer-Yerushalmi issued indictments against five soldiers and started to try to move the case to trial.
However, she severely erred in illegally leaking evidence against the five soldiers prior to trial (had she presented the evidence at trial or received permission from the IDF chief or the courts to publicize the evidence pretrial, there would have been no issue), then trying to cover up her illegal act, and then appeared to have a sensational public breakdown, almost committing suicide or faking suicide.
Ultimately, her successor, current IDF legal chief Maj. Gen. Itay Offir, closed the case not because he found the five defendants innocent, but largely because of the fantastical sideshow Tomer-Yerushalmi created, which he thought made a trial untenable.
Underlying Tomer-Yerushalmi's clearly illegal leaking actions was a reasonable intent to ensure that the arrested soldiers be probed and tried on the charges as opposed to a mob breaking them out of prison with no accountability.
The fact that she melted down not only said something about her own personal failings, but also about the domestic atmosphere and unprecedented pressure that the government and portions of the public have placed on any legal officials daring to probe IDF soldiers' actions.
All of that is to say that it becomes less surprising that Israeli legal officials took longer to publish their results when they knew that both most Israelis and most global critics would mercilessly attack them and their reputations for doing so.
There was no "reward" for honestly addressing complexity waiting at the end of the road.
It seems that Tomer-Yerushalmi's fears delayed publication at least since January 2025, when sources first told the Post that many updates could already be published, with no real coherent explanation why those decisions were delayed.
Practically speaking, Offir cannot be blamed as he only took office in November 2025.
Publishing the results in nine months was certainly not fast, but also is not unreasonably slow, taking into account how much he had to study from scratch when he came on board.
But all of these internal Israeli sagas will not quiet critics and do not repair the damage done to Israel's global legitimacy by the severe delay in publishing the report.
Tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed alongside tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists, and there needs to be a more timely accounting for that.
The IDF put out five reports on its criminal probes and indictments following the 2014 Gaza conflict. It will eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, need to put out at least that many, or its future reports will need to address a larger number of cases.
Of course that will only be a partial accounting.
One of the reasons that the ICC has been able to go after Netanyahu and other senior Israeli officials is because Israel has not probed any of them, only lower-down IDF soldiers involved in specific attacks.
But what about the policy decision to level 80-90% of Gaza's structures? What about the decision to block food aid from March to May 2025, even if Israeli estimates were that there was sufficient food inventory for many months? What about the general ratio of "acceptable" collateral civilian deaths to military targets being hit even when there were military targets?
Former deputy attorney-general Roy Schondorf already in May 2024 publicly recommended the one proper way to handle these issues: a re-run of the post-2009 Gaza conflict Turkel Commission.
Israel has probed its war-making decisions before.
If it does again, the ICC will have to freeze its arrest-warrant process.
Most importantly, probing everyone, from the highest officials to the lowest, has a shot at convincing those fair-minded people in the West and elsewhere that, however imperfect, Israel does care about human rights.
Such a detailed narrative is a moral obligation to do justice to Gazan civilians who got wrongly caught in the crossfire and to bring to justice any soldiers who broke the rules, and it can also finally put the simplistic, and sometimes antisemitic, genocide campaigners on the defensive for the first time, where they will have to address facts and depth, and not just make generic accusations.