08/25/2026
For three hours, a five-year-old girl sat trapped in a bullet-riddled car in Gaza City, surrounded by the bodies of her dead family, and begged someone to come and save her. "I'm so scared," Hind Rajab told the Red Crescent dispatcher who stayed on the phone with her. "Please come. Please call someone to come and take me."
The dispatcher promised she would send help. But the ambulance sent to reach Hind -- its route cleared in advance with Israeli forces -- was targeted and destroyed by an Israeli tank, its two paramedics killed before they could reach her.
Hind, terrified, alone in the dark, was never rescued. When her body was recovered nearly two weeks later, she had become something no child should ever have to be: a symbol. Her recorded pleas, heard around the world, made her the face of the more than 20,000 children killed in Gaza, in what a United Nations inquiry has formally declared a genocide.
Now, more than two years after Hind died, Israel has said it will investigate how she was killed. Last week, following what it called a review of the incident, the Israeli military announced a criminal investigation into her death -- and, for the first time, acknowledged that its own forces had fired on the car.
It was a remarkable admission from a military that had spent two years insisting otherwise, having claimed at one point that its troops were "not present near the vehicle or within firing range." The investigation, the army said, would focus on "alleged failures in the coordination" of the ambulance that was sent to save her.
Almost no one who has followed Hind's case expects it to end in accountability. In nearly three years of war, with more than 70,000 Palestinians dead, Israel has answered for almost none of it.
None of this is for want of evidence. What happened to Hind is known in granular, damning detail. On January 29, 2024, she and her family were doing exactly what Israel had told Gaza's civilians to do: fleeing. They had packed into a black Kia and were trying to leave Tel al-Hawa, a neighborhood in Gaza City, when Israeli forces opened fire.
A reconstruction by the investigative groups Forensic Architecture and Earshot, working with Al Jazeera, later counted 335 bullets fired into the car, and placed an Israeli tank as close as 13 meters away -- near enough, the investigators concluded, that it was "not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children." They found no evidence of any armed exchange. This was not crossfire. It was a stationary car, full of a family, fired on at close range.
Hind was not the first to die. The initial barrage killed her uncle, her aunt, and three of her cousins; her 15-year-old cousin Layan, who managed to call the Red Crescent, was cut off mid-sentence by a burst of gunfire that killed her too. That left Hind alone -- wounded, hidden among the dead, and, as the Red Crescent coordinator who kept her on the line would recall, growing frightened of the dark as the hours passed and night came on. She was still waiting when the line finally went silent.
That Hind's killing is being examined at all sets it apart. Her case drew this rare scrutiny for one reason: the world heard her voice, calling for help, in her own words. Countless others died with no recording, no reconstruction, no outcry loud enough to force even the promise of an inquiry.
Even so, those closest to her hold little hope. Her mother, Wesam Hamada, called the investigation a "long-overdue step" but was blunt about its limits: "justice has not yet begun." She does not want "a closed military investigation," she said, but an independent and transparent one -- "real accountability for everyone found responsible, because Hind is not just a news story."
The Hind Rajab Foundation, which bears her name, said flatly that it had no confidence in the probe. "We do not trust the Israeli justice system," its president said, "not out of an ideological position, but because of the track record."
That track record was on display in last week's announcement itself. Even a probe this limited is exceptional: of some 150 incidents its own reviewers examined, the Israeli military referred only a handful for criminal investigation, and cleared the rest. Among them was the April 2024 strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers -- citizens of Britain, Australia, Poland, and North America, traveling in a clearly marked convoy -- which it ruled no crime at all, despite what it admitted were "serious failures."
Last week, Britain, Canada, and Australia jointly condemned the decision as "shameful"; the charity's founder, José Andrés, called it "wrong and painful." If Israel would not hold itself to account for killing seven foreign aid workers in a case that drew global outrage, few expect a different outcome for a Palestinian child.
And there is a further reason for doubt -- one that has nothing to do with Israeli courts, and everything to do with what powerful people intend to do with the ground where Hind died.
For more than a year, Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have spoken of Gaza less as a place where more than two million people live than as real estate to be cleared and redeveloped. Trump has called it a "big real estate site," proposed that the United States "take over" the territory, and mused about relocating its residents elsewhere -- "Why would they want to return?"
Kushner, admiring Gaza's "waterfront property," has since unveiled a reported $30 billion plan for a rebuilt strip of resorts, towers, and data centers, one glossy rendering of which bears the name "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands." Critics, legal scholars, and members of Congress have described the vision plainly: the forced displacement of a population, which is to say ethnic cleansing.
The timing is hard to ignore. Israel's announcement about Hind came just days after Kushner met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to advance that plan. And so the investigation arrives shadowed by an obscene possibility: that the people promising to look into how one child was killed are entertaining a future built literally atop the rubble where she and tens of thousands of other children died -- a Trump-themed beachfront development on a mass grave.
The independent accountability Hind's mother is demanding faces another obstacle still: the governments with the power to deliver it are instead working to undermine it. The Trump administration has sanctioned the International Criminal Court -- which issued war-crimes warrants for Israel's prime minister -- along with a series of Palestinian human rights organizations pursuing legal accountability for the war.
Hind's mother has been clear about what would count as justice. She does not want the military that killed her daughter to sit in judgment of itself; she wants an independent, transparent investigation with real accountability. It is the same thing World Central Kitchen demanded -- an independent commission, "because the IDF cannot credibly investigate its own conduct."
That same reckoning is owed not only to Hind but to all of them: the more than 70,000 people, including more than 20,000 children, killed over nearly three years of war. The overwhelming majority of those deaths will never be examined at all. A single military probe, opened under international pressure and more than two years too late, is not accountability. What the dead are owed is a full and independent one -- every strike, every family, every ambulance, every name.
It begins, but cannot end, with a five-year-old girl who spent the last three hours of her life begging for help that never came, terrified and alone. Hind Rajab, her mother insists, is not just a news story. She was a child. She was afraid of the dark. And she should still be alive.
---
--> For an unflinching account of Hind's final hours, the Oscar-nominated 2025 film "The Voice of Hind Rajab" reconstructs the events of that day around the real recordings of her calls for help at https://amzn.to/4gwIUGr
--> To support the pursuit of legal accountability for Hind and other victims of the war, learn about the work of the Hind Rajab Foundation, which files cases in courts around the world on their behalf, at https://www.hindrajabfoundation.org/
--> To support treatment for children wounded and orphaned in Gaza through the Palestine Children's Relief Fund (PCRF), visit https://www.pcrf.net/
--> To support UNICEF's work helping suffering children in Gaza, visit https://www.unicefusa.org/how-help/donate/gaza-crisis-unicef-donate
----
For a touching picture book about a young girl living through airstrikes on Gaza, we recommend "Sitti's Bird: A Gaza Story" for ages 5 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781623718251 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/451j0Xe (Amazon)
For two picture books about the experiences of Palestinian-Americans, check out "A Map for Falasteen" (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781250896704) and "Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine" (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781797202051), both for ages 4 and up
For both real-life and fictional stories of Mighty Girls living during wartime, visit our “War & Conflict” book section at https://www.amightygirl.com/books/social-issues/war-conflict
----
For reporting on Israel's criminal investigation into Hind Rajab's killing and its first admission that its forces fired on the car, see CNN's account at https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/19/middleeast/israel-military-idf-hind-rajab-firing-intl
For Hind's mother's response and her call for an independent investigation, see NBC News at https://www.nbcnews.com/world/israel/hind-rajab-killing-gaza-israel-military-investigation-mother-justice-rcna593554
