Eight incidents recur across three or more of the published compilations of alleged Israeli war crimes, the earliest dated April 1948 and the most recent the Gaza campaign begun in October 2023. The lists themselves are broadly consistent; what varies, entry by entry, is what stands behind the entry. One of the eight produced criminal convictions in a court: Kafr Qasim, 29 October 1956, where an Israeli military court convicted the Border Police personnel involved in 1957 and the sentences were later commuted. One produced a finding by an Israeli state commission of inquiry, the Kahan Commission’s February 1983 report on Sabra and Shatila. For the campaign now on every list, the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps reported in 2024 that over 1,000 incidents had been referred for factual assessment and 74 criminal investigations opened, its own count of its own processes.
Key Findings
- Eight incidents recur across three or more of the named published compilations, spanning April 1948 to the campaign begun in October 2023, with the edges of each list differing by publisher.
- One recurring incident carries a criminal conviction: at Kafr Qasim, 29 October 1956, an Israeli military court convicted the Border Police personnel involved in 1957, with sentences later commuted, as Encyclopaedia Britannica’s reference entry records.
- Israel’s Kahan Commission of Inquiry reported in February 1983 that the killings at Sabra and Shatila, 16 to 18 September 1982, were carried out by Lebanese militia forces, and found Israeli officials indirectly responsible.
- The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps reported, as at 3 August 2024, 74 criminal investigations opened and over 1,000 incidents referred for factual assessment, its own counts, alongside its published threshold that civilian death or injury in armed conflict “in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct.”
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed) coded 26.9% of 1,504 British media Facebook comments on the May 2021 escalation as antisemitic, and within that set 27.9% invoked Israel’s sole guilt for the conflict.
Which incidents recur across the published war-crimes lists?
Eight incidents recur across three or more of the published compilations: Deir Yassin in April 1948, Qibya in October 1953, Kafr Qasim in October 1956, Rafah in November 1956, Sabra and Shatila in September 1982, the Gaza operation of 2008 to 2009, the Gaza operation of 2014, and the campaign begun in October 2023.
The compilations that carry them are published by different kinds of body, and each is dated. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s reference entry on the Arab-Israeli wars supplies the conflict chronology into which most entries are slotted, covering 1948, 1956, 1967, 1982 and 2008 to 2009. The International Commission of Jurists, a jurists’ organization, published a Gaza international humanitarian law briefing in October 2024 covering the current campaign. The BBC reported on war-crimes allegations in Gaza in 2025. Ahram Online, an Egyptian news outlet, publishes a listing that opens at Deir Yassin in April 1948 and includes the Jerusalem killings of October 1990. The Institute for Middle East Understanding, an advocacy organization, published a 2014 listing that includes Qibya in October 1953 and Sabra and Shatila in September 1982, and states its own position on each.
Where the lists diverge is at the edges. A raid at Beit Jala in January 1952, an attack on the Bureij refugee camp in August 1953, the killings in Jerusalem in October 1990 and an airstrike on the al-Dalu family in November 2012 appear on some compilations and not on others. Several publishers also use the term for patterns of conduct across an entire operation rather than for a single dated event, which is why the 2008 to 2009, 2014 and post-2023 entries name campaigns rather than places.
Is it often said the list runs from 1948 to today?
It is often said that the list of incidents runs unbroken from 1948 to the present, and on the published compilations it does. Of the eight recurring entries, two carry a finding by an Israeli state body: the 1957 military-court convictions at Kafr Qasim and the Kahan Commission’s February 1983 report on Sabra and Shatila.
The chronological premise holds at both ends. The oldest entry on nearly every compilation is Deir Yassin, April 1948, which Ahram Online’s listing places first and which Benny Morris (2004, Cambridge University Press) and Ilan Pappé (2006, Oneworld) both treat as a documented event of that war. The most recent is the campaign begun in October 2023, which the International Commission of Jurists’ October 2024 briefing and BBC reporting in 2025 both address. No gap in the sequence is asserted by any publisher named here.
What differs from entry to entry is the evidentiary tier. A compilation entry records that a publisher alleges conduct and applies a characterisation to it. A criminal conviction records a court finding under a criminal standard of proof. A state commission of inquiry finding records a determination by a body the state itself appointed, with its own terms of reference and no criminal sanction attached. For six of the eight recurring entries, what stands behind the listing is documentation by an organization or reporting by a news outlet, each working to its own definitions of what the term covers. The distinction between allegation, charge and adjudication runs through the legal record behind the current campaign as well, and it is the distinction the compilations, by their format, do not carry.
Which listed incident produced criminal convictions in an Israeli court?
One: Kafr Qasim, 29 October 1956. Israeli Border Police shot Arab villagers returning home after a curfew of which they had not been informed, and an Israeli military court convicted the personnel involved in 1957, with the sentences later commuted, as Encyclopaedia Britannica’s reference entry records.
No other recurring entry on the compilations carries a conviction in any court. For the current campaign, the closest published equivalent is a count of process rather than outcome. The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps, in a review first published 24 February 2024 and updated 3 August 2024, reported 74 criminal investigations opened: 44 concerning the death of detainees held by the IDF, 8 alleged detainee mistreatment, 13 alleged pillaging or stealing, 6 alleged illegal use of force, and 3 alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity. These are the IDF’s own counts of its own processes, published by a party to the events, and they count investigations opened rather than findings, indictments or convictions.
The Corps also publishes the threshold that produces the count. In its own words, in armed conflict “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, as they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity.” The same review reported over 1,000 incidents referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, with hundreds still undergoing material collection and assessment at the time of writing. The 74 is therefore a function of that stated standard, and any ratio drawn between the referrals and the investigations is a ratio of the standard as much as of the conduct.
What did Israel’s own commissions of inquiry conclude?
One state commission of inquiry sits behind an entry on these lists. Israel’s Kahan Commission reported in February 1983 that the killings at Sabra and Shatila, 16 to 18 September 1982, were carried out by Lebanese militia forces, found Israeli officials indirectly responsible, and its report was followed by the removal of the defence minister.
The commission was appointed by the state whose forces were in west Beirut at the time, so its conclusion is that state’s own inquiry into its own conduct rather than an external determination. It is also the only entry on the recurring lists where the convening state published a formal finding of responsibility, and the distinction it drew, between direct perpetration and indirect responsibility, is a distinction the compilations that carry the incident generally do not reproduce.
The machinery has since been made permanent. The Military Advocate General’s Corps records that the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism was created during the 2014 Gaza conflict on a recommendation of the Turkel Commission and “now operates as a permanent body which conducts factual assessments.” That mechanism is where the over 1,000 referrals sit, and it is a fact-finding stage rather than a judicial one.
Alongside it the Israel Defense Forces publish an ethical code, “The Spirit of the Israel Defense Forces,” which states the values it requires of soldiers and commanders, including Purity of Arms, Human Life and Discipline. The code is doctrine: it records what the force requires of itself, and it is evidence of the stated standard rather than evidence of conduct measured against it. No figure derives from it, and quoting it establishes nothing about any particular incident on any compilation. It matters here only because a reader weighing an allegation against a force needs the force’s own published standard on the page beside it.
Where do the casualty figures in these lists come from?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported 70,942 deaths in Gaza to the end of December 2025 and attributes that count to the Palestinian Ministry of Health rather than measuring it itself. That is the pattern that runs through the compilations: the publisher carrying a toll is frequently not the body that produced it.
The chains are traceable in some cases and not in others. The Institute for Middle East Understanding’s 2014 listing attributes its Second Intifada toll to B’Tselem’s compilation, a monitoring organization counting on its own definitions, so the figure is B’Tselem’s own and the listing is a relayer. The American Friends Service Committee publishes its own count for a 2023 airstrike on the Engineers’ Building in Gaza, so there the publisher and the counter are the same body and the count is that organization’s own. For Deir Yassin, the toll appears in Ahram Online’s listing without a named originating publisher, so the trail stops at the relaying outlet and no count appears here as an established total.
Where a party to the events publishes a count, it is that party’s count. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies reported 1,664 Israelis confirmed killed and 17,809 wounded in the war as at 5 September 2024, including 1,184 killed on 7 October 2023, with no official body credited for the killed and wounded figures. The Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps publishes investigation counts but no casualty count, and the IDF’s evacuation and precautions materials publish no number of warnings issued or strikes aborted at all, so no magnitude for those measures exists in the record. That asymmetry, between bodies that count and bodies that relay, is what a reader has to hold when a single figure appears in several places at once, and it runs through the documentary record on civilian harm in Gaza as well.
Which 1948 incidents do historians themselves dispute?
Benny Morris (2004, Cambridge University Press, archival history from Israeli military and state archives) puts the 1948 displacement at roughly 700,000 Palestinians, and attributes it to causes varying by locality and phase, including military attack, fear of attack, expulsions in certain sectors and flight, while rejecting a single master expulsion plan.
Ilan Pappé (2006, Oneworld Publications) reads the same war as the execution of a planned removal, and titles the argument “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” Both name Deir Yassin, April 1948. The disagreement is not about whether the event occurred but about what the sequence of 1948 events, taken together, should be called, and the two monographs are the named scholarly poles of that dispute. Neither is a measurement of the other’s claim, and the archives both draw on are the same Israeli state archives. This is the layer under the oldest entry on nearly every compilation, and it is a live disagreement between named historians rather than a settled reading, which is set out further in the 1948 displacement record.
The founding text of that year is a primary record and can be read directly. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read 14 May 1948 and published in Official Gazette Number 1, declares the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, states that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex,” and appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.” The Knesset’s published English translation reads “citizens” in the equality sentence; other widely used translations render the word as “inhabitants.” Morris and Pappé read the same document and the same year to different conclusions, and the document itself is what each is interpreting.
Which incidents has an international court actually charged?
Zero. No court outside Israel has recorded a conviction of any Israeli official for any incident on the recurring compilations, and the only convictions in the record for any listed entry are the 1957 Israeli military-court convictions at Kafr Qasim.
Two international proceedings are named on the current lists and neither is a conviction. The International Criminal Court announced arrest warrants in the Gaza situation in November 2024. A warrant is a charging step: it records that a prosecutor’s application met the court’s threshold for issuing process, and it establishes no finding of guilt. The International Court of Justice delivered an advisory opinion in 2024 addressing the occupation rather than any individual incident, and an advisory opinion is not a criminal determination against any person.
The three statuses that the compilations run together are therefore separable and separately checkable. An incident is cited when a publisher lists it and applies the characterisation. An incident is charged when a prosecuting authority files process against a named person. An incident is adjudicated when a court reaches a finding under its own standard of proof. Across the eight recurring entries, the count of citations is high, the count of charges attaching to a specific listed historical incident is not published by any of the compilations named here, and the count of convictions is one, in a domestic Israeli court, in 1957. An entry can sit on every list for seven decades without any of the later two statuses ever attaching to it, and six of the eight recurring entries are in that position today.
Which Israeli bodies reject the war-crimes characterization?
The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs published in 2025 a ceiling of at most 41,000 civilians in Gaza dying of war-related causes, its own arithmetic subtracting estimated natural deaths and Israel’s count of fighters killed from the Gaza health ministry total. The Center’s own page states that neither the 67,000 total nor the 21,000 fighters figure has been independently confirmed.
That is a stated ceiling produced by a research institute from inputs supplied by parties to the conflict, not a count. Other Israeli-aligned bodies contest different parts of the compilations, and each is a party’s or an advocacy organization’s own position, dated. NGO Monitor, in its Annual Report 2024 published in 2025, disputes the methodology of the organizations that compile incident listings, and reports its own mapping of 157 groups in the United States and 111 in Canada linked to what it describes as an anti-Israel network, its own counts on criteria it does not state. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies published a situation report in 2025 carrying Israeli casualty totals for the war, no official body credited.
The Israeli government’s own position statements supply counts of a different kind. The Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, in a statement updated 17 September 2025, reported 207 hostages returned or recovered, 148 alive and 59 deceased, and 48 remaining in captivity as at 14 September 2025, together with more than 106,000 aid trucks entering Gaza since October 2023. Every one of those is the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s own reported figure, published by a party to the conflict and not independently verified, and the statement refers readers to the military’s own aid-data site for the detail. On the compilations these figures do not appear at all; on the ministry’s page the compilations’ characterisations do not appear either. Both sets are published, dated and attributable, and neither is measuring the other.
How does the atrocity-list framing appear in measured discourse?
Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications) found that 26.9% of 1,504 comments on leading British media Facebook pages reacting to the May 2021 escalation were coded as antisemitic against an IHRA-based scheme.
The same coding scheme classified 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments as antisemitic.
Within the British antisemitic comments, the study measured which framings appeared: 27.9% invoked Israel’s sole guilt for the conflict, 8.1% child murder or blood libel, 7.7% denial of Jewish self-determination, 5.2% an apartheid analogy and 4.2% a Nazi analogy. The authors also report that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the British antisemitic comments, so the coding depends on surrounding material and not on the comment alone. The categories describe what the comments invoked; they carry no claim about any underlying event.
Two survey programmes measure how historical-atrocity framing relates to attitudes. Enstad (2026, peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced) ran two nationally representative Norwegian surveys, N = 1,575 and a preregistered replication at N = 1,653, and found endorsement of Holocaust inversion, the belief that Israel treats Palestinians as badly as Jews were treated during the Second World War, associated with justification of harassment and violence against Jews and with refusal to take a stance against such aggression. Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025, peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced) ran two British experiments, N = 354 and N = 490, priming participants with war-in-Gaza material, and report two separate pathways to anti-Jewish hostility, one running through social dominance orientation and one through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people. All three findings are associations reported by their authors, with the authors’ own caveats, and none establishes a direction of cause.
Methodology and limitations
The enumeration in this report was compiled from named published compilations and their dated entries: Encyclopaedia Britannica’s reference entry on the Arab-Israeli wars (major reference database), the International Commission of Jurists’ Gaza international humanitarian law briefing of October 2024 (jurists’ organization), BBC reporting in 2025 (news organization), Ahram Online’s listing (news organization), and listings published by advocacy organizations, which are named in the body and labelled as their publishers’ own positions. The count of eight is the count of entries appearing on three or more of those compilations; a different set of publishers would produce a different edge of the list, which is why the divergent entries are named rather than absorbed.
Four tiers of source carry the report’s figures. Primary and official records: the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (14 May 1948), the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General’s Corps review (2024), the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics year-end brief (2025), and the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s position statement (2025). Peer-reviewed research: Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), Enstad (2026) and Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025), the latter two carried from published abstracts, so no full-text detail is implied. Scholarly monographs: Morris (2004) and Pappé (2006), interpretive archival history rather than measurement. Organizations with stated missions: NGO Monitor (2025), the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (2025) and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (2025), each labelled where cited.
Three limitations bind what can be stated. The IDF figures are that party’s own counts of its own processes, published by a party to the events and not independently verified, and they count investigations opened rather than findings, indictments or convictions; they are also a function of the criminal-suspicion threshold the Corps publishes, which is quoted in full in the body. Where a compilation carries a casualty toll without naming the body that produced it, no count appears here as an established total, so this report gives no headline toll for any individual listed incident. And the discourse findings measure what comments and survey respondents expressed; they carry no determination about any incident on any list.
Conclusion
So what stands behind each entry on these lists? Across the eight incidents that recur on three or more of the published compilations, from April 1948 to the campaign begun in October 2023, the answer differs by entry and it differs sharply. One entry carries a criminal conviction, at Kafr Qasim, handed down by an Israeli military court in 1957 and later commuted. One carries a finding by a commission the Israeli state itself appointed, the Kahan Commission’s February 1983 report on Sabra and Shatila, which named Lebanese militia forces as the perpetrators and Israeli officials as indirectly responsible. For six, the listing itself is what stands behind the listing.
The current campaign is documented on both sides and by neither side’s opponent. The Military Advocate General’s Corps reported over 1,000 incidents referred for factual assessment and 74 criminal investigations opened as at 3 August 2024, under a published threshold holding that civilian death in armed conflict in most cases does not by itself indicate reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct. Israel’s Foreign Ministry reported 207 hostages returned and more than 106,000 aid trucks as at 14 September 2025. The Palestinian statistical bureau reported 70,942 deaths to the end of December 2025 and attributed the count to the health ministry rather than measuring it. Outside Israel, the count of convictions for any incident on any of these lists is zero, and the count of charging steps is a warrant announcement in November 2024. Historians working the same archives, Morris in 2004 and Pappé in 2006, still disagree over what to call 1948.
A chronology is portable in a way that a court record and a commission report are not. It travels as eight names and eight dates, and the tier behind each name stays behind. Becker, Ascone and Troschke measured 26.9% of 1,504 British media comments in May 2021 as antisemitic, and within that set 27.9% reached for Israel’s sole guilt for the conflict and 8.1% for child murder or blood libel, vocabulary far older than any incident on these lists. Enstad’s two Norwegian surveys found endorsement of Holocaust inversion associated with justifying aggression against Jews. Which raises the question this report can pose and cannot settle: when a list of names and dates circulates stripped of the record that produced or failed to produce each entry, is the stripped list itself one of the inputs that feeds those older tropes? Society has the compilations, the court records, the commissions and the counts. What it does with the distance between them is the open matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do published lists of Israeli war crimes differ from one another?
Because each publisher applies its own definition and its own inclusion criteria. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s reference entry organises by conflict, the International Commission of Jurists’ October 2024 briefing addresses the current campaign under international humanitarian law categories, and advocacy organizations publish listings that state their own positions. The eight recurring entries are those appearing on three or more of the named compilations; incidents such as the January 1952 Beit Jala raid and the November 2012 al-Dalu airstrike appear on some and not others.
Why do some entries name an operation rather than a single event?
Several publishers apply the term to patterns of conduct across an entire campaign, which is why the 2008 to 2009, 2014 and post-2023 entries name operations rather than places. That shifts what the entry asserts: a dated single event can in principle be examined by a court or a commission, while an operation-level entry describes an aggregate of many events under one heading.
Does the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Advocate General operate independently?
The Corps states in its 2024 review that “The MAG is subject only to the law on professional matters and operates with full independence,” and that its decisions are “subject to civilian oversight and can be challenged on appeal in front of Israel’s Attorney General, as well as before the Israeli Supreme Court.” That is the body’s own published account of its own standing, not an external assessment of it.
What does the Israel Defense Forces’ ethical code say about civilians?
Its Purity of Arms value states that a soldier “will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.” The code is the force’s own published doctrine, so it records the required standard and produces no figure and no evidence about conduct in any particular case.
What does Israel publish about aid entering Gaza during the ceasefire?
The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories reported 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering Gaza between 10 October 2025 and 7 June 2026, more than 70,000 cubic meters of water facilitated per day, and 18,000 tons of medical supplies since the ceasefire began. All are that unit’s own reported counts, resting on self-declaration by suppliers rather than weighing at the crossings, published by a party to the events.
Why is the 1948 total of displaced Palestinians given as approximate?
Because the figure comes from archival reconstruction rather than enumeration. Morris (2004) puts it at roughly 700,000 from Israeli military and state archives, and the Palestinian statistical authority’s own census programme did not begin until 1997, so Palestinian population figures for years before that have no census basis and are modelled or back-estimated.
Sources
- Ahram Online. Listing of massacres in the Palestinian territories. News organization.
- BBC News, 2025. Reporting on war-crimes allegations in Gaza. bbc.com/news/articles/c0r1xl5wgnko. News organization.
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke, 2022. Antisemitic Comments on Facebook Pages of Leading British, French, and German Media Outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, 2025. The Gaza Terror Offensive, 1 August to 5 September 2024. besacenter.org. Research institute.
- Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, 2026. Humanitarian Situation Report During the Ceasefire. gaza-aid-data.gov.il. Official record, party’s own reported counts.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica. Arab-Israeli wars. britannica.com/event/Arab-Israeli-wars. Major reference database.
- Enstad, 2026. Holocaust Inversion and Justification of Anti-Jewish Aggression: Evidence from Two National Surveys in Norway. DOI 10.1037/amp0001704. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
- International Commission of Jurists, 2024. Gaza International Humanitarian Law Briefer. icj.org. Jurists’ organization.
- Israel Defense Forces. The Spirit of the Israel Defense Forces. idf.il. Official record, the party’s own published doctrine.
- Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General’s Corps, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza. idf.il. Official record, party’s own reported counts.
- Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, 2025. Israel’s Objectives and Current Operation. embassies.gov.il. Official record, party’s own reported counts.
- Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 2025. The Death of Genocide. jcfa.org. Research institute.
- Morris, 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521009676. Scholarly book.
- NGO Monitor, 2025. Annual Report 2024. ngo-monitor.org. Monitoring organization, advocacy mission.
- Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh, 2025. The Impact of Globalized Conflicts: Examining Attitudes Toward Jews Among Britons in the Political Context of the War in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 107. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
- Pappé, 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications. Scholarly book.
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948; Knesset English translation. Primary and official record.