Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) strongly condemns the decision by the Israeli Military Advocate General (MAG) to close — without opening a criminal investigation — cases MSF submitted for review.
These cases regard attacks on an MSF convoy in Gaza City in November 2023, which killed two people, and a February 2024 strike on an MSF shelter in Khan Younis that killed two people and injured six others.
This does not come as a surprise. These responses come nearly two years after MSF submitted its request, which was followed by a submission to the Israeli High Court of Justice challenging MAG’s failure to provide any answer to our formal requests.
MSF convoy attack in Gaza: All elements point to Israeli army responsibility
Read moreThis is not justice. Two years of silence — followed by closures that raise more questions than they answer — is unacceptable. However, it is the predictable output of a military apparatus investigating itself — a system which has demonstrated it is unwilling to respond to the extent of violations that may amount to war crimes in Gaza.
MSF staff and their family members are dead. Their names are known. Their locations were shared. Their vehicles were identified. We have always maintained that all elements point to the Israeli army’s clear responsibility for the deadly attacks. And yet, those responsible for their deaths have declined to pursue any criminal investigation.
One of the two MSF staff family members killed in the convoy attack in November 2023, Alaa Al Shawa, was also a volunteer supporting MSF medical teams at Al-Shifa Hospital. The attack on MSF's shelter in Khan Younis in February 2024 killed the daughter-in-law and wife of an MSF colleague. Six other people were injured in the attack on that shelter, five of whom were women or children.
With its decision, MAG has made clear that there is no prospect of accountability within the Israeli legal system for the killing of our staff, just as there has been no accountability for Israel's ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
No internal military review can substitute for genuine accountability
A total of 15 MSF staff members have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces since October 2023. This is just a fraction of the 1,700 health care workers who have been killed in that time. Israeli forces continue to kill civilians with impunity, made clear by MAG’s decisions.
The decision to “close” these incidents must be understood in their proper context. In Gaza, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. Health care facilities have been destroyed. Humanitarian convoys have been struck. Journalists, medical personnel, UN personnel, and aid workers have been killed in numbers unprecedented in any recent conflict.
Remembering our colleagues killed in Gaza
Health care staff and humanitarian workers must be protected.
MSF reaffirms what it has stated since the start of this violence: There is no military objective that justifies the wholesale sacrifice of civilians. And there is no internal military review that can substitute for genuine, independent, and impartial accountability.
We demand that the cases involving our colleagues be reviewed by an impartial investigative body.
To our colleagues we have lost, and to the civilians and humanitarian workers who have perished in Gaza: We will not let your deaths be filed away as procedural inevitabilities. You deserved protection. You deserve justice.
