Over the past ten years, Yesh Din has been conducting continuous and meticulous monitoring of the Israel Police’s work in investigating and serving indictments against Israeli citizens suspected of harming Palestinians or their property in the West Bank.

So far, Yesh Din has published yearly data on the outcome of these investigations in order to examine how many of these investigations led to charges served against suspects of offenses, compared with the number of investigations that resulted in no outcome. Our data has consistently demonstrated that the rate of solved cases of ideologically motivated crimes committed against Palestinians and their property has remained extremely low, and the number of indictments against Israeli suspects is so low that is can be considered negligible.

This new data sheet is a first presentation of a comprehensive view: the outcome of legal proceedings in the rare cases in which Israeli suspects were indicted for offenses committed against Palestinians and their property in the West Bank. Our data shows that only one third of the legal proceedings (33.3 percent) resulted in a full or partial conviction of the defendants. Nearly a quarter of the legal proceedings (22.8 percent) were eventually cancelled or vacated, and another quarter (24.6 percent) resulted in a judicial decision not to convict the defendants, despite finding that they did committed the offenses for which they were tried.

These statistics demonstrate that a police complaint filed by a Palestinian in the West Bank has a mere 1.9 percent chance of being effectively investigated, and a suspect identified, prosecuted and convicted. This sorry state of affairs suggests grave concerns regarding Israel’s pretense of effectively enforcing the law in the occupied Palestinian territories.