Internal short circuit (ISCr) can lead to failure of Li-ion cells and sometimes result in thermal runaway. Understanding the behavior of Li-ion cells in ISCr condition is thus critical to evaluate the safety of these energy storage devices. In the current work, a pinch–torsion test is developed to simulate ISCr in a controlled manner. It is demonstrated that the torsional component superimposed on compression loading can reduce the axial load required to induce ISCr with smaller short spot size. Using this pinch–torsion test, two types of commercial Li-ion pouch cells were tested under different state of charge (SOC). Based on the severity of the cell damage, a series of thermal runaway risk scores were used to rate the thermal stability of these cells. One of the cell types showed significantly increased hazard as the SOC increased while the other type exhibited relative uniform behavior among different SOC. Therefore, this novel pinch–torsion test seems to be an attractive candidate for safety testing of Li-ion cells due to its abilities to consistently create small ISCr spots and to differentiate cell stability in a wide range of SOC.