G. is an IDF soldier currently on a trip in South America. Her photo, showing an attractive blonde with an M16 in a meditation pose against a desert backdrop, appeared this week in the regular update of the Diaspora Affairs Ministry's National Center for Combating Antisemitism. The risk level was defined as high. Her full name, photo, profile, and location were disseminated on Instagram by the users @abuela_rock and @Palestina_Rasite. At the control center of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, they monitored the attacks against her and shared the information with the IDF, intelligence agencies, the National Security Council, and the Ministry of Justice.
G. is just one of dozens of IDF soldiers being targeted by pro-Palestinian antisemitic elements around the world. This week, Israel anxiously followed the escape of Yuval Vagdani from Brazil through Argentina to Miami, until his safe return to Israel. Thus, the Oct. 7 Nova massacre survivor, who fought Hamas terrorism in Gaza, was forced to flee from a popular destination for young Israelis during a post-service trip.
The legal pursuit of IDF soldiers escalated this week, but it is not new. It has existed for two decades. Lists of Israeli “war criminals” were published after Operation Cast Lead, and the State of Israel understood that it had to fight the phenomenon. A cabinet resolution from 2009 allocated a budget for the issue, and a unit in the Ministry of Justice and an inter-ministerial team were established to deal with this new-old antisemitic trouble.
During Operation Iron Swords, there was a change in this trend. The war was documented in real-time by Palestinian elements – and also by IDF soldiers themselves fighting on the ground – and both sides have been uploading photos to social networks in real-time. Apparently, there is no need for foreign spy agencies, nor for organizations like Breaking the Silence, which interview soldiers anonymously, take their testimony out of context, and pass it on to international bodies. Apparently, it's enough to sit in a Brussels cafe with a laptop and follow Instagram, Telegram, and TikTok channels where the videos are uploaded.
Thus, between sips of coffee and bites of croissant, one can identify the soldiers appearing in the videos, save them, and categorize them into folders. Taking things out of context can be done with almost any video. The demolition of buildings that contained tunnel shafts and combat equipment (as we know, almost every house in the Strip) becomes deliberate damage to civilian property. Firing at an ambulance that Hamas terrorists use to transport weapons becomes a war crime.
It's understood that on the fringes, regrettably, like in any war, there are unacceptable acts, which the military prosecution investigates and then files indictments against those who misbehaved. The wider fringes include acts documented by foolish soldiers, some of whom were joking around and didn't understand the gravity of their actions: a soldier who documented himself reading a book with a burning library in the background at a Gaza university; soldiers who photographed themselves holding women's underwear; a soldier who documented himself making a threatening gesture during the interrogation of a terrorist, and more.
Fondness for Nasrallah
Let's return to the Brussels cafe, where two of our protagonists are sitting. Not great heroes of Israel, but certainly small heroes of Hezbollah: Dyab Abou Jahjah and Karim Hassan, both born in southern Lebanon and now live in Belgium. In September 2024, the two established the Hind Rajab Foundation, named after a Palestinian girl killed in Operation Iron Swords. The foundation is registered as a non-profit organization in Brussels, its funding sources are unknown, but its damages are already making waves. The foundation is a subsidiary of March 30 group, which has been operating for three decades in pursuing IDF soldiers.
Abou Jahjah, a muscular pro-Hezbollah activist, was previously documented with a Kalashnikov at a “summer camp.” He published opinion pieces in the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar, wich is a mouthpiece of Hezbollah, and boasted about meeting Nasrallah. He holds Belgian citizenship and is mainly a local political activist and international provocateur. In 2017, he praised a terrorist attack in Jerusalem that killed three soldiers, and as a result, was fired from the Belgian newspaper De Standaard. He called the 9/11 attacks “sweet revenge.” Due to his extreme activities, British authorities banned his entry into their territory in 2003 – but Tehran actually welcomed him in the past, at a conference after which he increased his political activity.
Karim Hassan, the foundation's secretary, was elected in October 2024 as a representative of the Vilvoorde City Council. Hassan is active among the local Muslim population and even headed the Arab-European League. During the years he headed the league, a Dutch court convicted the organization of spreading Holocaust-denying content. At a demonstration organized by the league, calls for the murder of Jews were heard. An article in Belgium published a picture of him wearing a Hezbollah hat and praising Samir Kuntar, the murderer of the Haran family in Nahariya in 1979.
During Operation Iron Swords, there was a change in this trend. The war was documented in real-time by Palestinian elements – and also by IDF soldiers themselves fighting on the ground – and both sides have been uploading photos to social networks in real-time. Apparently, there is no need for foreign spy agencies, nor for organizations like Breaking the Silence, which interview soldiers anonymously, take their testimony out of context, and pass it on to international bodies. Apparently, it's enough to sit in a Brussels cafe with a laptop and follow Instagram, Telegram, and TikTok channels where the videos are uploaded.
His social media accounts consistently publish incitement and support for terrorism. Facebook has blocked his account several times.
“At the beginning of the war, Abou Jahjah tried to sue Israeli soldiers holding Belgian or Dutch citizenship. In the Netherlands, he tried to sue six soldiers, but the police and the court did not accept his claims,” Freak Vergier, a researcher and lawyer at the Dutch CIDI organization that monitors and fights antisemitism in the Netherlands, says. “He lives in Belgium in a Dutch-speaking area and speaks the language, so he also focused efforts in the Netherlands. He built a network of contacts from the Netherlands with whom he worked.”
Among the contacts in the Netherlands, one can find Haroon Raza, a controversial lawyer who was previously reprimanded by the local bar association after calling an IDF soldier “pigs.” Raza took part in legal advice and filing complaints in the Netherlands. “Abou Jahjah has been acting against Israel for more than 20 years. After he exposed personal details and shared pictures of Israeli soldiers with citizenship and family in the Netherlands, the Dutch police asked the Belgian police to visit him at home, following complaints filed against him for shaming. In the past, he was convicted in a Dutch court for preparing an antisemitic poster. By the way, in the past, he was also convicted in a Belgian court for another criminal offense. He was supposed to sit in jail for a year, but the court waived it for him. There was a period of a few months when he disappeared, and now he's back. The Belgian and Dutch press extensively covered his activities. This week he received much more extensive exposure and attention than he received in the past. This time he was relatively successful because he's learning from past mistakes, and that's worrying. It's hard to discover who's helping him, but he claims to have volunteers from 100 different countries. He receives a lot of sympathy in the Netherlands, especially among Muslims. He's vocal and criticizes Israel, so he's popular among Israel haters,” says Vergier.
“From an esoteric problem, Abou Jahjah has turned into a multi-armed octopus,” says an Israeli source operating in Europe. “Something here doesn't make sense. In recent months, there has been a fundamental change in his behavior. Over the years, he has proved that he's not the sharpest pencil. He had scandalous statements that a sophisticated person doesn't say. Suddenly, he's operating around the clock and on different continents, with continuous monitoring and probably using advanced technologies. In my estimation, there's no chance this is done by just one or two people, without external funding and assistance from people working with him continuously. Probably an anti-Israel body has latched onto his platform and put him in the front.”
Ambush in South America
This week, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed a complaint against a soldier in Thailand, and against the soldier Yuval Vagdani in Brazil. The complaints are turning from a minor nuisance to a legal danger and disruption of the systems in the State of Israel when the soldier subject to the complaint is present in the country where the complaint was filed. Therefore, when the soldier exposes his location on social networks, he becomes easy and preferred prey. Part of the foundation's agenda is to create media noise and panic in Israel, so in previous times, it published the soldier's name and photo even before a complaint was actually filed against him. Thanks to this, the authorities in Israel monitoring antisemitic activity on the networks could locate the soldier and warn him in advance. In Yuval's case, for the first time, a non-public complaint was filed with the federal court in Brazil.
At the same time, the foundation published the fact of filing the complaint accompanied by a blurred photo of him, without mentioning his name. All this, apparently, to make it difficult to extract him from Brazil. Nevertheless, within two hours, the entities in Israel managed to identify the soldier, contact him, and help him escape from Brazil. All this happened even before the federal judge issued a public order to open an investigation. Eventually, Yuval returned home safely, and the police in Brazil returned the complaint to the court, citing “difficulties in opening the investigation.”
The one who filed the complaint in Brazil on behalf of the foundation is Brazilian lawyer Maira Pinheiro from Sao Paulo. We contacted her this week to try to understand who are the factors behind the foundation. She spoke with us for about half an hour but was careful in her words, and the conversation with her suddenly ended when our questions became more pointed.
“From an esoteric problem, Abou Jahjah has turned into a multi-armed octopus,” says an Israeli source operating in Europe. “Something here doesn't make sense. In recent months, there has been a fundamental change in his behavior. Over the years, he has proved that he's not the sharpest pencil. He had scandalous statements that a sophisticated person doesn't say. Suddenly, he's operating around the clock and on different continents, with continuous monitoring and probably using advanced technologies. In my estimation, there's no chance this is done by just one or two people, without external funding and assistance from people working with him continuously. Probably an anti-Israel body has latched onto his platform and put him in the front.”
“I contacted the foundation before the current case,” Pinheiro said. “I volunteered to work on any legal case they had in Brazil because I was aware that there was a high probability that possible suspects of war crimes would come here in the summer for vacation“
Q: The complaint filed in Brazil was filed in your name, not in the name of the foundation.
“The foundation doesn't have headquarters in Brazil so easily. They can't be the authors of the request, but I was hired by them, to perform legal work, and after around three days that we started the case, we reached out to the [Palestinian Gaza] families, and one of the families gave me power of attorney in Brazil. In our criminal justice system, the victim of a crime has the right to have its own legal representation that works alongside the prosecutors. So when this victim signed the power of attorney, I became formally the victim's lawyer.”
Q: How did you reach the victims, was it through the foundation?
“Yes, our investigation team found them and presented extensive evidence that they had the property of the house, and also evidence that allowed us to present more geolocation evidence, and they also signed a statement where they described the circumstances in which the people who were sheltering in the house were forcibly displaced by the arrival of these Israeli forces.”
Q: Regardless of the results of the procedure, will you transfer the evidence to the International Court?
“Yes, of course, because it's very valuable evidence, and it had been, it has been the digital evidence. The geolocation investigation is very thorough. There's no reason why it shouldn't go to the International Criminal Court, especially because in this event specifically, these specific war crimes that we affirm that the soldier was involved in, are part of a broader genocide project.”
Q: Do you or the foundation have collaborations with organizations or people in Israel?
“Not that I'm aware of. follow the works of organizations like B'Tselem and Gisha and Physicians for Human Rights in Israel. I find some of their work very relevant, like that report by B'Tselem's under the title ‘Welcome to Hell.’ It's very thorough and had a great impact. So there's valuable work being done by Israelis in the pursuit of human rights violations. In my court brief I quoted [left-wing Israeli daily] Haaretz many times and also from Times of Israel. Sometimes, I follow Israeli media because there is valuable information there. Sometime,s the way you talk about each other and about your internal dynamics is more candid than how Western media portrays Israel. So there's very valuable information to be found in Israel media and from the works of Israeli organizations, but we don't have any kind of formal collaboration or partnership with these organizations.”
Q: Are you working to bring Hamas terrorists to justice as well?
“Well? As a lawyer, I believe in the right of legal defense and due process, and that's how I think human disputes should be settled. So I think the best way to solve human conflict, even though the law has main flaws and limitations, is through due process of a crime and the person has to answer and has to have the right to be properly defended.”
Q So theoretically, if Hamas terrorists were to arrive in Brazil, would you call for their arrest and investigation as well?
[Call sunddently ends]
What would explain the sudden end of the conversation, and Attorney Pinheiro's ignoring of our written approach later? Perhaps it is her additional career. In her spare time, Pinheiro is an enthusiastic participant in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, expresses in various videos her support for armed Palestinian resistance, and is documented drawing the Hamas triangle on graffiti praising the October 7 massacre.
All this doesn't stop her and other lawyers of the foundation from filing complaints that have the appearance of seriousness, as a legal source explains. “The complaints talk about specific offenses in local law. They show the video of the alleged offenses. Recently, we started seeing claims of dangerousness, obstruction of justice proceedings, and fear of escape in the complaints. All this is done to expedite the process against the soldier, so that not only an investigation will be opened, but also an arrest warrant will be issued. They don't just want media noise, or to harass the soldiers and troll the systems in the State of Israel – they want a victory image of an IDF soldier in handcuffs. The nightmare scenario from Israel's perspective is a soldier being investigated or arrested by a foreign authority.
“It should be emphasized that so far, there have been zero such events in Operation Iron Swords. All we've had is a few dozen complaints, only a few of which matured into investigations. For those that did mature, the investigation was opened when the person subject to the investigation was not in that country and, therefore, was not in danger. The systems in Israel, in the political, legal, and intelligence arena, take this issue seriously and work in full cooperation, and so far successfully.”
The Octopus’ arms
The activity of the Hind Rajab Foundation may have made headlines this week – but it's just the tip of the iceberg. Already at the beginning of the war, Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi began publishing videos from footage of Palestinians in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria, and from the social media accounts of Israeli soldiers. Tirawi has connections with armed organizations in Jenin, and sources within the “Lions’ Den,” as reported by Channel 14. News. His publications are particularly quoted by the South African team at the International Court of Justice, which accused Israel of genocide. Since the beginning of the war, Tirawi has exposed dozens of posts and videos showing soldiers in Gaza behaving inappropriately. His publications have gained resonance in Haaretz, Reuters, and the Washington Post.
In October 2024, Tirawi published an investigation in Drop Site News, focusing on the IDF's 749th Combat Engineering Battalion. Tirawi exposed the names and photos of its senior officers and the unit's operations, as well as enthusiastic statements by soldiers and officers describing their mission as “flattening Gaza.”
Drop Site News is a site that has hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It was established in July 2024 as an independent news site focusing on politics and wars. Its main journalists are Younis Tirawi and Sami Vanderlip, who also reports for Al-Jazeera. Both also maintain buzzing accounts on social networks. The news site operates under a non-profit organization in the US, so those who want to support anti-Israel activity will have their donation recognized for tax purposes in the US.
And these are not the only ones. Among the myriad of anti-Israel accounts and organizations that harass IDF soldiers across the network and echo the various publications, one can find the following:
Israel Genocide Tracker: An organization that began operating in May 2024. Its number of followers – 164,000 on Twitter and 20,000 on Telegram. The organization scans social networks and collects information about Israeli soldiers from social networks, with the help of an information-gathering bot. The organization claims its activity is done from within Gaza. It's not known who funds it.
Quds News Network: An organization identified with Hamas. It employs about 300 freelance reporters and volunteers. It has 567,100 followers on Twitter. The organization was established in 2001, and it operates a Palestinian news agency. The agency has focused over the years on covering events in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria, around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Recently, the organization has focused on presenting soldiers as war criminals.
Khalissee: Another Twitter account that takes part in the personal and legal attack on IDF soldiers. It has been active since 2023 and has 326,000 followers. The account publishes critical content towards the State of Israel, and it has gained media attention, among other things, due to the publication of information about Israeli soldiers, including personal details and photos.
These are just the tips of the threads, raising suspicion of coordinated activity by a foreign entity supporting or directing at least some of the octopus arms of the activity.
Another organization is DAWN – “Democracy for the Arab World Now” – a political non profit, wealthy and with extensive influence in the US. The non profit leads legal warfare campaigns against Israel. According to a report by NGO Monitor, some of the employees and board members of the organization have connections with the Muslim Brotherhood, and they have expressed support for Hamas activities.
In December 2023, DAWN submitted to the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court a list of 40 senior Israeli commanders, demanding an investigation into “the planning, ordering and execution of Israel's indiscriminate bombings, reckless destruction and mass killing of civilians in Gaza.” As part of its campaign, the organization published cards of “main suspects” with the name, rank, photo and role in the IDF. Among the foundation's employees, one can find Jewish Americans and Israelis.
But there's no need to sail to big America – similar activity can be found in little Israel too. Extreme Left organizations and Israeli media outlets, as described by Brazilian lawyer Pinheiro, constitute a database from which information leading to the persecution of IDF soldiers worldwide can be drawn.
For example – Haaretz, which recently published an anti-settler campaign of an investigative nature against Major General Yehuda Fuchs, based on testimony from Breaking the Silence and anonymous sources from within the IDF. It's likely that the publication from Haaretz will be converted in the future into lawsuits against Fuchs in international legal arenas. Knesset member Ofer Cassif wanted to expedite the process, apparently, and tweeted in English a picture of Fuchs under the title “Wanted.”
G. the “wanted” is already in a safe place, thanks to the control center of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs – but this is just the beginning of a challenging confrontation.
The post Handcuffing IDF soldiers: How the Gaza war took a new turn abroad appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.
