Israel’s top military lawyer on Monday described as “very grave” an Israeli airstrike on Rafah that according to Gaza health authorities killed dozens of Palestinian civilians, and said an investigation by the armed forces continued.

“The details of the incident are still under an investigation, which we are committed to conducting to the fullest extent,” Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the military advocate general, said at a conference hosted by the Israel Bar Association.

Israel has face international criticism over the Sunday airstrike, which Gaza sources claim killed dozens of people.

Israel said the strike targeted two senior Hamas terrorists. But the attack also apparently hit an area in Rafah’s Tel Al-Sultan neighborhood in western Rafah where thousands of people were taking shelter, setting blazes that engulfed several tents and shelters.

“The IDF regrets any harm to noncombatants during the war,” Tomer-Yerushalmi said.

She added that Israel is investigating the deaths of Palestinians captured during the Gaza war as well as at a military-run detention camp where a human rights group has alleged abuses of inmates.

Citing accounts by former inmates and a doctor from the Sde Teiman base, the Physicians for Human Rights group said last month that detainees have suffered severe violence causing fractures, internal bleeding, and even death.

Palestinians have also accused Israeli soldiers of illegal killings during the seven-month-old Gaza war.

“To date, 70 Military Police investigations have been opened into incidents that have raised suspicion of criminal offenses,” Tomer-Yerushalmi said.

“These investigations also address allegations raised about the incarceration conditions at Sde Teiman detention center and the deaths of detainees in IDF custody. We are treating these allegations very seriously and are taking action to probe them.”

Tomer-Yerushalmi described the war as “unusual” in the “unprecedented scope of the emerging legal issues,” in the “sensitivity and great complexity of the legal challenge we face,” and “the immediacy with which the legal front affects the war on the ground.”

Israel’s enemies, she said, are “cynically taking advantage of the law, while brutally using the civilian population as human shields.”

Israel is “in a war it did not choose” against “an enemy that abuses and harms even its own people.”

The war erupted on October 7 when the Palestinian terror group Hamas led a massive cross-border attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people amid numerous atrocities. The thousands of terrorists who burst through the border with the Gaza Strip also abducted 252 people of all ages as hostages to Gaza.

Israel responded with a military campaign to destroy Hamas, topple its Gaza regime, and free the hostages.

Tomer-Yerushalmi also discussed developments at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, where cases have been brought against Israel over the ongoing war.

At the ICJ, South Africa has accused Israel of genocide, while at the ICC, the chief prosecutor said last week he was seeking arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, alongside Hamas’s leaders. The arrest warrant request has been denounced by most of Israel’s international allies.

South Africa’s charges of genocide are “disgusting” and the claim that Israel is deliberately killing civilians and destroying their property “has no basis in reality,” Tomer-Yerushalmi said.

In addition, it is “outrageous” that the ICC announced the arrest warrant requests together with a similar move against three Hamas leaders.

ICC top prosecutor Karim Khan has accused Netanyahu and Gallant of, among other things, using starvation as a weapon against Gazans.

That claim is “absurd” considering the IDF’s efforts to bring food, medicine, and humanitarian resources to Gaza, Tomer-Yerushalmi said.

The ICC prosecutor, in defending his move, has said it was in part due to him not seeing that Israel is doing anything to investigate accusations of wrongdoing by its forces in Gaza.

But Tomer-Yerushalmi argued that the review and investigation mechanisms in the IDF, including the Military Police, “are professional and independent.”

She noted that “the professionalism and abilities of these bodies were recognized in the past by international bodies too, including the ICC prosecutor.”

“There is no other country in the world that can be as proud of its commitment to examine compliance with the rule of law, in the midst of an existential war,” she said.

The IDF’s Rafah operation is considered one of the final phases of its war with Hamas. Last week, the ICJ ordered Israel to stop operations in Rafah that would risk the destruction of the civilian population sheltering there.

Israeli officials have said the ambiguous order still leaves room for it to continue its offensive in the southern Gaza city.

While allowing that there may have been violations of law by troops, “these are exceptions that do not indicate the rule” and do not indicate a deliberate policy to deviate from the laws of war.

Tomer-Yerushalmi also stressed that the IDF’s commitment to justice “does not stem from the fear posed by the international arena. It stems, first and foremost, from the fact that the State of Israel is a country of laws. The rule of law, and the purity of weapons, are values woven into the IDF’s code of values from the day it was established.”