In the West Bank, when the Israeli military inflicts harm to Palestinians or damage to their homes and/or property, Palestinians have to suffer and bear it. According to figures newly released by Israel’s Military Advocate General’s (MAG’s) office, should a victim decide to officially file a ‘complaint of harm,’ they have less than a 1% chance of even having a day in court. As reported in the Times of Israel, of the 2,427 incidents actually officially filed over the period of 2016–24, only 23 even resulted in an indictment.
Israel’s Yesh Din organization obtained the data via freedom of information request. The data does not include acts of settler violence against Palestinians, nor does it include data for 2025, as the situation has only worsened. (As measured by settler attacks, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that 2025 reported a new record of over 1,800 attacks by Israeli settlers on West Bank Palestinians.) While Israel contends to international human rights organizations and legal bodies that their justice system is highly reticulated and advanced, the overwhelming evidence is that it is designed, and it operates, to block justice. The concern of Yesh Din and others is that this is the system in place now to handle incidents of wrongdoing in Gaza the last 2–3 years.
An officially filed complaint may never be investigated. That was the case for almost 80% of them. Of the rest, many of them were ‘slow-walked,’ going past the 9-month standard. The fewer than 1 in 20 that resulted in an indictment resulted in diminished cases, where access to witnesses and evidence were lessened.
The Times of Israel reported Yesh Din’s analysis of just the cases that they were involved in, in which of 28 killings that were permitted an investigation, it took MAG more than 14 weeks just to decide to open an investigation into 11 of them—and 6 of the 11 received no attention for over 6 months. In the case of Belal, a 27-year old resident of Beitunia, a suburb of Ramallah, who was shot in the back in January 2020 by soldiers when he was visiting family, it took 6 months for MAG to decide to open an investigation and another 19 months to decide not to indict, and an additional 10 months after to reject an appeal of the non-indictment.
Yesh Din concluded: “The long wait until a criminal investigation is launched, and again until a decision is made following it, thwarts the investigations in practice, precluding any possibility that the military law enforcement system will penalize offenders and handle suspected violations of the laws of armed conflict. By refraining from addressing complaints promptly, effectively and with due gravitas, the MAG Corps sends a clear message to soldiers that the army condones violence, beating, looting of property, wounding or even killing of Palestinians in the West Bank.”
