By Sondos Asem
For over 15 months, Israeli soldiers have taken to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other social media platforms to show off their handiwork in Gaza.
Now, this very evidence is being used to pursue war crimes charges against them across the globe, with the Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation at the forefront of these efforts.
“You can’t massacre people, film yourself doing it, broadcast it to the world, confess to your actions, and then simply go about your life, sitting next to me at a cafe in Brussels,” says Dyab Abou Jahjah, president of the foundation.
He emphasises that their mission is clear: “We are going after war criminals wherever they go.”
Abou Jahjah says that the foundation has gathered over 8,000 pieces of evidence related to alleged war crimes by Israeli soldiers in Gaza.
“The evidence is there,” he tells Middle East Eye. “The challenge is to turn it into a legal case.”
Videos of soldiers proudly demolishing homes, wearing Palestinian women’s underwear and torching libraries have caused huge offence worldwide.
But Abou Jahjah says the Hind Rajab Foundation is looking at this footage in a different light.
“We’re looking at a crime scene, searching for the crimes, and establishing connections between the perpetrators, the crime and the victims,” he explained.
The Hind Rajab Foundation is named in honour of a six-year-old Palestinian girl whose tragic death at the hands of Israeli soldiers on 29 January 2024 has become symbolic of the widespread violations of international humanitarian law committed by Israeli forces.
An investigation in June revealed that Rajab and five of her family members were targeted with 335 Israeli army bullets as they attempted to flee northern Gaza in their car.
For three hours, Hind was the sole survivor, trapped alongside her slain relatives. Desperate for help, she called Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics, but they were killed by Israeli forces before they could rescue her.
A harrowing recording of Hind’s final phone call, released after the incident, captured her chilling pleas: “I’m scared of the dark, come get me.”
Her tragic story has driven Abou Jahjah and his team of human rights lawyers to seek justice for countless victims like Hind.
“In this genocide, children make up the majority of the victims,” Abou Jahjah says, “which speaks volumes about the nature of the genocidal party: the Israeli army and the Israeli state.”
Palestinian health officials say that at least 18,000 children were among the more than 48,000 Palestinians killed by Israel’s war on Gaza.
Offensive litigation
The Hind Rajab Foundation brings cases against state officials, senior commanders, as well as lower-ranking soldiers.
The bulk of its work is focused on offensive litigation and a two-pronged accountability strategy, targeting two categories of soldiers: Israelis who hold the nationalities of a country where a court case can be initiated, and travelling soldiers who are not nationals of their countries of destination.
“We we do not see ourselves as an NGO. We see ourselves as a justice machine,” Abou Jahjah says.
So far, the Hind Rajab Foundation has sought to initiate nearly 100 cases against Israeli soldiers in 14 countries with universal jurisdiction: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden and Thailand.
National courts can prosecute international crimes under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows a state to prosecute individuals for serious international crimes, regardless of where the crime was committed or the nationality of the victim or perpetrator. But universal jurisdiction rules vary by country.
Most UN member states have jurisdiction over one of the four most serious crimes under international law: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and torture.
A 2021 survey by Amnesty International showed that 164 (roughly 85 percent) of the 193 UN member states have criminalised at least one of these crimes under their national law.
The litigation is easier when soldiers hold the nationality of the country where they are present. Lawyers can immediately establish jurisdiction, explained Abou Jahjah.
“We are very hopeful that on the level of dual-national soldiers, we will reach judgments and convictions.”
It is less straightforward to prosecute visiting soldiers who aren’t citizens of countries they are visiting. In that case, universal jurisdiction is the legal basis for bringing war crime charges.
Additionally, under international criminal law, soldiers can be held criminally responsible for violations of international humanitarian law even if they were following orders from their superiors.
The Israeli army denies committing war crimes in Gaza and insists that its commanders and soldiers abide by the laws of armed conflict, which prohibit targetting non-combatants.
Two breakthroughs
In its first five months, the Hind Rajab Foundation achieved two major breakthroughs, says Abou Jahjah.
The first was in Cyprus in November, where a prosecutor opened an investigation against an Israeli reservist soldier after a case that the foundation filed against him.
The Israeli state helped the soldier flee Cyprus, according to Abou Jahjah and Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
In its complaint, the foundation supplied Cypriot authorities with evidence, including his own video footage showing him burning a civilian home and property in Gaza while stating: “We will not stop until we burn all of Gaza.”
A few weeks later, the foundation initiated a similar case, this time in Brazil against another Israeli soldier who was visiting the country on holiday. The Hind Rajab Foundation said that the Israeli state again helped the soldier flee Brazil before he could be arrested.
The Hind Rajab Foundation, acting on a power of attorney granted by families of Palestinian victims, accused the soldier of taking part in the destruction of entire neighbourhoods in Gaza, which it argued amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity.
They submitted 500 pages of video evidence as well as photographs and geolocation data documenting his participation in the alleged crimes.
Acting in response to the criminal complaint filed by the Hind Rajab Foundation, the Federal Court of the Federal District, following a probe by the prosecutor, issued an urgent order for the police to investigate and take action against the suspect.
Abou Jahjah says the Brazil case marked a historic precedent. It was a court order, by a judge, which would have been followed by an arrest warrant had the suspect been on Brazilian soil.
Additionally, Abou Jahjah says he considers it a form of indictment, with significant legal weight, because a judge would not issue such an order unless he or she were convinced that there was a plausible case.
In the aftermath of the Brazil case, Israeli media published guidelines for travelling soldiers to avoid arrest for war crimes, including refraining from sharing social media posts showing evidence of unlawful actions.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army announced new rules to blur the photos and conceal the identities of soldiers of all ranks in publicity materials.
Changing the mindset of states
Abou Jahjah says that even though states around the world have universal jurisdiction on war crimes, many tend to be reluctant to allow cases against Israeli combatants to move forward, under the pretext that the alleged crime was not committed on their territory and the suspect isn’t a national.
He believes the Hind Rajab Foundation has a role to play in convincing them to apply universal jurisdiction where they can.
“Most countries have the tendency to say: ‘this is not our problem, go elsewhere, go to the ICC or go to Israel itself’,” Abou Jahjah explains.
“We’re trying to enter that debate with them, trying to convince them, trying to actually educate them on the fact that they have jurisdiction,” he adds.
“I think it’s important to keep doing that because we need to change the mindset of prosecutors and judges, and eventually also politicians in many countries around the world in terms of how they look at international law.”
In addition to using national court systems, Hind Rajab Foundation lawyers filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against more than 1,000 soldiers in October 2024, including evidence that Abou Jahjah says will remain in the court’s archive permanently and assist with related cases.
The ICC is the world’s only permanent international court with the jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and the crime of aggression.
But the ICC is a court of last resort, operating under the principle of complementarity, which means that it only intervenes when states are unwilling or unable to prosecute suspects.
It also follows a gravity threshold, typically targeting senior officials and commanders responsible for the most serious crimes rather than soldiers and lower-ranking officers.
Prosecuting Israeli officials
But seeking to prosecute senior officials and commanders is also part of the organisation’s work, Abou Jahjah says.
This includes an ICC case brought by the group against Israel’s military attache in Belgium, Colonel Moshe Tetro, who had previously served as the commander of the Israeli military unit accused of orchestrating famine in Gaza during the early months of the war.
Following reports about the case, Israel’s ambassador to Belgium denied the accusations against Tetro.
“There was no objection to his appointment and he received full diplomatic accreditation,” Israeli Ambassador Idit Rosenzweig-Abu told the Belgian newspaper De Morgen. “Israel acts according to international law.”
The Israeli military, meanwhile, decribed Tetro as a “highly respected and distinguishe officer” and said it “strongly rejects allegations of war crimes”.
Another case was filed against Major General Ghassan Alian, head of Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), which oversees civilian activities in Gaza such as aid distribution, while he was visiting Rome in January.
The complaint accused him of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes over his leading role in enforcing and supervising Israel’s total siege on Gaza following the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
Alian also publicly referred to Palestinians in Gaza as “human animals”, demonstrating his genocidal intent, the group said.
In Tetro’s case, prosecuting him before a Belgian court would be prevented by his diplomatic immunity. But he has no immunity before the ICC, since Belgium is a state party to the court’s statute.
The ICC in November issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, who was then defence minister, for several charges: primarily the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.
Abou Jahjah expects the ICC to issue additional warrants for Tetro and Ailan because they were the executioners of Netanyahu’s and Gallant’s orders on the ground.
These efforts may take years to bear fruit, he says, but they are worth the wait.
“It’s an important fight and we will keep doing this.”
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond.
14 February 2025
Source: middleeasteye.net