About 2,200 Palestinians were killed during the 2014 conflict, more than half of them civilians. On the Israeli side, 73 people were killed, most of them soldiers. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry found that both Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants had been responsible for violations of international law that could amount to war crimes.

The Constitution of the International Criminal Court stipulates that it should only intervene in cases where countries are unwilling or unable to investigate themselves. At the urging of Palestinian leaders, prosecutors at the international court have been conducting a preliminary inquiry into possible war crimes in Palestinian territories, but the chief prosecutor has not yet made a decision regarding the court’s jurisdiction to investigate events during the 2014 war.

B’Tselem does not have access to military intelligence materials or other tools used by the army investigators, but it is critical of the overall system. It says the Military Advocate General faces an “inherent conflict of interest” being both in charge of investigations within the military and the body responsible for providing the military with legal counsel before and during the fighting.

B’Tselem added that there were no investigations of what it called “the true culprits” — government officials and senior military commanders who devised policy and were responsible for the orders — because the inquiries had been limited to isolated cases and had focused exclusively on the soldiers in the field.

As in a previous report, B’Tselem criticized the Israeli practice of targeting residential buildings thought to be harboring militants or weapons. Two years later, it said, there had still been no investigation of the policy of targeting inhabited homes, which it said had resulted in the death of hundreds of people. In several of those cases, it said, the military had concluded that its attacks were lawful, even if the results were regrettable and the result of faulty or inadequate intelligence or of ineffective warnings.

The Israeli military said that the latest B’Tselem report rehashed old allegations and displayed “a complete lack of comprehension of the reality of combat in the Gaza Strip,” as well as a “lack of expertise in the interpretation and application of the Law of Armed Conflict in such a context.” The report, the military said, failed to acknowledge that most of Israel’s aerial attacks in Gaza in the summer of 2014, which numbered more than 6,000 over 50 days, did not result in any civilian casualties. Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel during the fighting in 2014.