BBC Verify gathered 61,000 reports from BBC News and Reuters which mentioned Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon, published between 7 October 2023 and 19 August 2026.
We built an AI search engine to look through those reports for incidents where people may have been injured or killed by Israeli forces, and where the IDF said the report was being investigated, or for example “looked into”, “reviewed”, “checked” or “examined”.
This identified almost 5,000 reports. Each one was manually checked by BBC Verify reporters, who excluded any which did not meet the criteria above.
This left 1,343 reports of incidents that the IDF said it was looking into. Some of these reports described the same incidents.
We built another AI tool to remove these duplicate reports. It grouped reports into unique incidents based on the publication date, incident date, location, and numbers reported injured or killed.
We then manually checked that each report had been assigned to the correct group, leaving us with 300 unique incidents.
For each of these incidents we then manually checked our records including the incident date, location, and how many people were killed or injured against the original BBC News or Reuters report.
We shared the details of each case with the IDF including the incident date, location, the news report describing the incident, and the IDF’s original comment indicating it was looking into the matter. We asked the IDF for comment and the latest status of each case. The IDF did not say whether any of these investigations had concluded in response to the BBC’s requests.
For each incident we also looked for statements on the IDF’s website suggesting that the investigation had been concluded, using two different AI assisted web search engines. We found evidence that 28 cases were closed based on statements detailing the findings or indicating that no further steps would be taken.
For a further 18 incidents, it was unclear whether the investigation had been concluded. This included cases where the IDF published initial information about the incident without a clear indication it was closed, and cases where the IDF had characterised some or all of the people killed or injured as combatants, in statements on its own website.
This left us with at least 254 incidents of harm the Israeli military had said it was looking into, for which we did not find a public outcome on the IDF’s website.
This was not an exhaustive search, and it is likely that there are more investigations into incidents of harm that were not captured in our search.
Additional reporting by Barbara Metzler.
