BBC Verify gathered 61,000 reports from BBC News and Reuters which talked about Gaza, the West Bank or Lebanon, printed between 7 October 2023 and 19 August 2026.
We constructed 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 instance “looked into”, “reviewed”, “checked” or “examined”.
This recognized virtually 5,000 reports. Each one was manually checked by BBC Verify reporters, who excluded any which did not meet the standards above.
This left 1,343 reports of incidents that the IDF said it was wanting into. Some of these reports described the same incidents.
We constructed another AI device to take away these duplicate reports. It grouped reports into distinctive incidents based mostly 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 right group, leaving us with 300 distinctive incidents.
For each of these incidents we then manually checked our information including the incident date, location, and how many people were killed or injured against the authentic BBC News or Reuters report.
We shared the particulars of each case with the IDF including the incident date, location, the information report describing the incident, and the IDF’s authentic remark indicating it was wanting into the matter. We requested the IDF for remark and the newest standing 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 seemed for statements on the IDF’s web site suggesting that the investigation had been concluded, utilizing two completely different AI assisted web search engines like google. We discovered evidence that 28 instances were closed based mostly 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 instances where the IDF printed initial data about the incident without a clear indication it was closed, and instances where the IDF had characterised some or all of the people killed or injured as combatants, in statements on its own web site.
This left us with at least 254 incidents of hurt the Israeli army had said it was wanting into, for which we did not discover a public end result on the IDF’s web site.
This was not an exhaustive search, and it is possible that there are more investigations into incidents of hurt that were not captured in our search.
Additional reporting by Barbara Metzler.
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