The Investigation is Ongoing
On Israel's Lies and Sham Investigations: 573 Reviews, 1 Indictment
A key to understanding Israel is understanding that its officials lie about everything. Not occasionally, not strategically, but routinely, and often absurdly. They lie as a matter of course.
If there’s one exception—an area where they’ve grown more candid—it’s in describing the endgame: permanent control from the river to the sea. The lies are meant to obscure their brutality in realizing that plan, while flaunting complete impunity.
No reasonable person still grants the Trump administration a presumption of honesty or good faith. Yet Israeli officials—who rival Trump’s record of deception and have aligned themselves with him for years—still receive it: from a mainstream media afraid of bias accusations, from politicians on both sides of the aisle, and from those clinging to an idea of Israel rather than the reality of the State itself.
For the sake of this argument, I’m not going to wade into what Israel may or may not have been decades ago—I’m focused on what it is today. So if recognizing the Trump administration as a nest of pathological liars doesn’t require abandoning every ideal one holds about America, then acknowledging that Israeli officials lie—constantly, blatantly—is something anyone can do, whether they identify as a Zionist, an anti-Zionist, or anything in between.1
Perhaps more people have just woken up to this fact, given the IDF was recently caught in a brazen lie about its killing of 15 aid workers in Gaza. After the bodies were found—riddled with bullet holes, buried in a mass grave alongside their crushed ambulances—an Israeli military official claimed the vehicles had been “advancing suspiciously,” without headlights or emergency signals, toward Israeli troops from the Golani Brigade, prompting them to open fire. A spokesperson then asserted, without evidence, that nine of the fifteen killed were operatives of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. They claimed they buried the bodies to prevent “wild animals” from eating them, but did not clarify if they feared they’d eat the ambulances, too.
Then the New York Times released video footage showing the vehicles had both headlights and emergency signals on—and that the IDF fired at them for seven minutes straight. Several minutes into the barrage, some of the victims could be heard reciting their final prayers. (“Mom, forgive me,” one paramedic repeats. “This is the path I chose, to help people.” The man who recorded the video was found in the mass grave with a bullet in his head.) The IDF revised its story, saying the claim about the lights being off may have been a mistake— “We’re doing our best to improve,” they said—but still insisted that at least six of the victims were terrorists. Again, no evidence was provided.
On Thursday, The Washington Post published its own investigation, revealing that the vehicle the IDF claimed was a “Hamas police car” carrying terrorists was actually an ambulance transporting three paramedics, who together had 55 years of service with the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The lone survivor also reported that two of the paramedics were wounded but still alive when soldiers brought them to the pit where they were later buried.
Before the ambush, a commander from the Golani Brigade told his troops, “Everyone you meet is an enemy. You recognize a person, open fire, eliminate them, and move on.” In Trump World, we call this “saying the quiet part out loud.” Why is this even controversial?
Last year, I reported on a July 2023 incident in which the IDF claimed it had “neutralized” a driver engaged in a “car ramming attempt” in Sebastia, a quiet village in the northern occupied West Bank.
The driver was Fawzi Makhalfeh, an 18-year-old college student on his way to his father’s factory with his best friend, Mohammad Mukheimar. IDF soldiers hiding on both sides of a dark street opened fire on their car. Fawzi was struck by more than 50 bullets and killed. Mohammad, shot in the arm, was dragged from the car, beaten, and arrested. Soldiers sprayed tear gas at a gathering crowd and blocked an ambulance from reaching the scene.
During Mohammad’s nine days in captivity, IDF prison guards repeatedly tortured him, twisting their boots into his open bullet wound while taunting him with gruesome details of his best friend’s death. When he asked a soldier why they’d attacked their car in the first place, the soldier just shrugged and said, “Oops.”
Months later, a soldier told me outright that the shooting had been a mistake, suggesting that these things just happen in places where people sometimes throw stones. I brought the claim to the IDF, but without international pressure or a major outlet chasing them down, the spokesperson ignored it entirely and repeated the original story.2
If more people had the chance to speak with the IDF directly and hear the lies straight from the source, they might be convinced. After a squadron of belligerent soldiers charged a small group of Palestinians I was with in Sebastia’s town square—cocking and aiming their weapons—and then shot a man in the leg the next day in the same spot, an IDF spokesperson told me that “nefarious terrorists” may have been operating in the area and using us as “human shields.” That’s a laughable claim to make about this sleepy farming village with no history of militancy. The truth is, the soldiers were pissed that locals kept raising a Palestinian flag every time they tore it down—a local IDF commander admitted as much. This was how they let off steam during their daily excursion to the flagpole.
On January 20, 2025, an Israeli sniper killed 14-year-old Ahmad Rasheed Sholi with a single shot to the chest as he walked with his friends near the kindergarten in Sebastia. I asked the IDF for comment the following day, and they told me that “soldiers responded with fire” after “terrorists hurled stones toward IDF soldiers,” and that the incident was “under review.”
When I pointed out the shot was fired from over 300 meters away—roughly ten times further than most full-grown men could throw a stone—they dropped the claim and repeated that the incident was under review.3
Over the course of the war, Israel has been caught in one demonstrable lie after another: about shooting civilians, using white phosphorus, bombing an evacuation route, torturing captives, killing journalists, killing medical workers, killing foreign aid workers, killing Hind Rajab, killing Hind’s family, killing Hind’s rescuers, and more.4 And this doesn’t include the lies Israeli officials have told about October 7 to fuel the war propaganda—like the claims about beheaded and immolated babies—which have had the unfortunate but entirely predictable effect of leading some people to doubt that Hamas committed any war crimes that day.
The basic pattern is the same: An atrocity is reported in Gaza; Israel denies responsibility and/or blames Hamas, and expresses outrage at the accusation. If international pressure mounts, Israeli officials promise an investigation—one that finds no wrongdoing, admits to a lesser violation, or quietly stalls without ever concluding—exactly what the system is designed to do. The Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din found that of the 573 reviews (Fact-Finding Assessments) with known outcomes filed during three major military operations in Gaza over the past decade, only one resulted in a criminal indictment via the official process (.17%). The data raised “heavy suspicions that the military law enforcement mechanism’s main role … is to maintain an appearance of a functional system in order to evade properly investigating suspected war crimes.” Meanwhile, new atrocities pile up before the last ones can be reckoned with, lie upon lie, until the sheer volume overwhelms any effort at accountability. It’s the classic “flood the zone” strategy, straight from the Trump playbook.5
It’s instructive to trace Israel’s growing cynicism through its responses to attacks on hospitals, starting with the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion in October 2023 that killed hundreds. After many outlets, including The New York Times, initially reported that Israel was responsible, Israeli officials and supporters around the world erupted in indignation at the charge, condemning it as antisemitic slander against the “world’s most moral army.” They launched a furious offensive, releasing video footage they claimed proved an errant missile fired from Gaza was to blame. Most outlets updated their coverage, and by the time experts deemed the footage inconclusive, Israel’s defenders had weaponized the incident, citing it as proof of the media’s supposed anti-Israel bias when new war crimes were reported.
Weeks later, as the IDF prepared to raid Al-Shifa Hospital—the largest in Gaza—they alleged Hamas had a command center underneath it, claims the media amplified.
Here is The Washington Post on what their investigation found after the raid was complete:
Weeks before Israel sent troops into al-Shifa Hospital, its spokesman began building a public case.
The claims were remarkably specific — that five hospital buildings were directly involved in Hamas activities; that the buildings sat atop underground tunnels that were used by militants to direct rocket attacks and command fighters; and that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards. The assertions were backed by “concrete evidence,” Israel Defense Forces spokesman Daniel Hagari said as he laid out the case in an Oct. 27 briefing.
After storming the complex on Nov. 15, the IDF released a series of photographs and videos that it said proved its central point.
“Terrorists came here to command their operations,” Hagari said in a video published Nov. 22, guiding viewers through an underground tunnel, illuminating dark and empty rooms beneath al-Shifa.
But the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas had been using the hospital as a command and control center, according to a Washington Post analysis of open-source visuals, satellite imagery and all of the publicly released IDF materials …
When asked if more evidence from al-Shifa would be forthcoming, the spokesperson said: “We cannot provide additional information.”
In the weeks between the hospital raid and the article’s publication, the IDF attacked several more hospitals—and in the sixteen months since, they’ve bombed dozens more, most of which barely register in the news or compel Israel to offer even the thinnest pretext.6
And then came Israel’s controlled demolition of the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital—Gaza’s only specialized cancer treatment facility—just last month. They filmed the destruction, shared the footage, and claimed Hamas had been using the facility as a base. But this one was different: It had been well-documented that the IDF had occupied the hospital by February 2024 and used it as a base of their own.
One could theoretically argue that the killing of 15 aid workers was the act of a few sadistic soldiers who don’t reflect the broader IDF. Maybe the same could be said of the drone operator who bombed the World Central Kitchen convoy, the soldiers who film themselves dancing in women’s underwear on the ruins of Palestinian homes, the prison guards at Sdei Teiman who rape and torture detainees—and even the Israeli ministers who protested for those guards’ right to continue doing so.
And for the sake of argument, let’s go further.
Let’s say the 200+ journalists killed were all secretly Hamas operatives. Let’s say the IDF has a perfectly sound reason for detaining Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, the pediatrician and chief of Kamal Adwan Hospital, without charge for months—and that he’s lying about the abuse he’s endured in prison (which must explain why he’s been barred from speaking to his lawyer). Let’s say the thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children being held without charge under “administrative detention” have all committed crimes too grave to name. Let’s say the X-rays of children with bullets in their skulls are fake, and the doctors who treated them are lying. Let’s say the testimonies of survivors are fabricated. Let’s say the satellite images are doctored. Let’s say the footage was staged. Let’s assume every Palestinian is lying. Let’s assume every human rights group is anti-semitic. Let’s disregard the declarations from Israeli leaders insisting there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. Let’s say the dead weren’t really killed, or if they were, they had it coming. Let’s treat every atrocity as a lie and/or a legitimate security measure—either it didn’t happen, or it was justified, or both. And let’s admit it—scrutinizing the only Jewish State this closely? Kinda suspect.
Even then, how do you justify bombing a cancer hospital that the IDF itself had shut down and occupied more than a year earlier?
If your answer is “To prevent cancer-stricken Hamas fighters from receiving chemotherapy,” please contact me so we can speak in private. But for the rest of us, the conclusion is clear: to get the Palestinians out by any means possible—including terror, extermination, and making Gaza uninhabitable.
That is, of course, the only plausible logic behind all of it: the targeting of desalination plants, bakeries, and food processing facilities; the blockading of food and humanitarian aid; the flattening of homes, universities, libraries, and cultural landmarks; the bombing of ambulances and aid convoys; the systematic killing of doctors, engineers, professors, artists, and journalists. The goal is to erase the very conditions of Palestinian life—to collapse the infrastructure, to sever the memory, to destroy the possibility of return. It’s a war on life itself, and it is being waged with such relentless brutality, and such a brazen indifference to accountability, that the lie becomes the point. The spectacle of impunity is part of the message: We can do this, and no one will stop us.
But honestly, this is all so obvious by now that it’s basically a trope, and it feels ridiculous to still be pointing these things out eighteen months into the most conspicuous atrocity of my lifetime. Trying to find a new conclusion to draw, I’m coming up empty—but I keep circling back to something I said earlier, and now I want to revise it.
I don’t actually believe many people still think Israel is telling the truth. Not really. Not in their hearts. Not the media, not the politicians, and not the people still dreaming of an Israel that doesn’t exist. At this point, most of them know what’s happening. The only question left is why they won’t admit it: because they think the massacre is justified, or because they know it’s indefensible, and they’re too afraid to say so.7 The investigation is ongoing.
For as long as this genocide goes on, nothing we do to try to stop it is enough. Not while our government arms the slaughter and we foot the bill. There’s no moral high ground left. At the very least, we could all admit that we know.
In the months since an Israeli sniper killed 14-year-old Ahmad Rasheed Sholi, I’ve called the IDF every week to check on the status of the investigation. Each time, a spokesperson assures me it’s still underway—somehow, they often know this without needing to check—though they can’t share any details. Lately, I’ve adjusted my approach: I no longer ask for information about the investigation. I just want proof that it exists.
On April 6, a spokesperson told me, “I cannot send you proof of an existing investigation because that counts as details of the investigation.”
I asked: how am I supposed to believe there’s an investigation if you won’t give me any proof it exists?
“You just gotta trust what we say.”
I’m not here to offer a media analysis—there are experts who do that far better than I can, so I’m primarily focused on the lies themselves. But suffice to say, it seems the press is long overdue for a reckoning over how it covers Israel’s lies. Given the stakes, and the breathless coverage of the war, Israeli officials’ statements deserves the same scrutiny the media eventually applied to Trump’s.
That said, in fairness to Trump, it was the Biden administration’s parroting of Israeli lies and callous indifference to Palestinian death that made Trump’s own genocidal policy seem unremarkable.
My friend Zaid Azhairi, a Sebastia resident who bears the scars of many beatings from IDF soldiers, believes there’s a much simpler explanation: The soldiers were bored.
It is beside the point of this piece, but Ahmad’s 17-year-old cousin, Nawar, was shot in the leg while picking up lunch for his family in January 2024. While I was speaking with Nawar, we bumped into his friend, Islam, who had been shot in the ass weeks before that.
For those who need a refresher on Hind’s story, it went like this: After an Israeli tank shelled her family’s car as they followed IDF evacuation orders—killing everyone but her—six-year-old Hind Rajab spent hours on the phone with emergency responders and her mother, begging to be rescued as tanks drew closer, trapped in the car with her dead aunt, dead uncle, and four dead cousins. (“I’m so scared, please come. Come take me. Please, will you come?”) The emergency team coordinated directly with the IDF for safe passage along a designated route. But when their ambulance came within 50 meters of Hind, an Israeli tank targeted and destroyed it, killing both paramedics. For twelve days, the IDF prevented anyone from reaching the car. When rescuers finally arrived, they found Hind, like the rest of her family, dead from multiple gunshot wounds, a coloring book at her feet. Put plainly: The IDF executed Hind’s family as they followed evacuation orders, executed her rescuers on a route they had approved, and then executed six-year-old Hind as she pleaded for help. Israel’s repeated claim that no IDF soldiers were in the area was contradicted by satellite imagery and extensive forensic evidence.
For a clue into how Israel became so emboldened, here is the Biden State Department’s Matthew Miller responding to questions about the Washington Post’s damning investigation: “What we are going to do is take the information that is contained in that Washington Post story, we’re going to go back to the government of Israel and ask them for further information. We would still welcome a full investigation into this matter, and how it occurred in the first place.”
The erosion of truth and its impact on democracy is a tired subject by now, but the parallels between Israel and the U.S. are hard to ignore, especially as Netanyahu and Trump wage simultaneous assaults on internal checks and balances. But just as any opposition to Trump that focuses solely on his lies and corruption while ignoring the deeper ideology of right-wing politics is destined to fail, the anti-Netanyahu protests—carried out, as Haaretz put it, in “the near total absence of reference to the war’s lethal consequences on Gaza,” and within “an indoctrination that needs destruction to justify the existence of Zionism”—cannot save Israel.
Here is WaPo again on what was found in the aftermath of the raid: “Several days later, when WHO medics arrived to evacuate those still inside, they said the place of healing had become a ‘death zone.’ At least 40 patients — including four premature babies — died in the days leading up to the raid and its aftermath, the United Nations said.”
Maybe one more question (and my apologies for breaking a promise I made earlier): How far back are they willing to trace the lies?
Thank you so much for bringing these human stories to life. What is happening there is so shocking, beyond words.
Although I have been aware and disgusted by what I've heard of this continuing genocide, your words today feel like wounds that will never heal. The perpetrators of these war crimes against other humans have become what they have hated most: persecutors of Jews by rabid bigots throughout history. Is this revenge? Sounds like it.