The IDF's Justice System Has a Secret: It Was Built to Protect Soldiers, Not Prosecute Them

Here's a thing you don't hear very often: a soldier only got indicted because he tried to deposit counterfeit money into his own bank account. That's it. That's the whole reason. The Israeli military's criminal investigation system — the one that processed 52 of the most publicly documented alleged war crimes in recent history, that generated 1,303 deaths and 1,880 injuries — produced its handful of indictments largely by accident. One soldier's investigation started because bank employees flagged fake bills. Another convict at Sde Teiman was only caught on video. The system didn't go looking for justice. Justice occasionally tripped over the system. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers posted thousands of videos and photos documenting their own alleged war crimes on social media — shooting civilians, abusing detainees, burning homes. Al Jazeera compiled over 2,500 such accounts. The response from the IDF's own justice apparatus? Almost nothing. Not a single prosecution for a battlefield killing in Gaza, across 18 months and tens of thousands of dead civilians. This is not a broken system. This is a system working exactly as designed . The Smokescreen Machine In November 2025, Drop Site News published something extraordinary: internal Israeli government documents obtained through freedom of information requests, filed by the human rights organization Yesh Din. These documents laid bare, in the military's own words, how Israel's military justice system actually operates. When a civilian casualty allegation comes in, it enters a filtering process overseen by the office of the Military Advocate General (MAG). Most cases get routed through the General Staff Mechanism for Fact-Finding Assessments — the FFA — a body established in 2014 and staffed by high-ranking officers "for the investigation of exceptional incidents." Here is the catch, as leaked Ministry of Justice documents (published by Distributed Denial of Secrets in July 2024) revealed: the military's claims that legal experts participate in these probes are false. One Ministry official wrote in comments on a draft legal filing: "I am not aware of such a thing." Another confirmed: "in practice this doesn't really happen."