Israeli soldiers who have posted on social media about their service in Gaza are increasingly facing scrutiny abroad — sometimes prompting their swift evacuation from countries where they are vacationing.
In the latest instance, a soldier who was traveling in Brazil left the country abruptly this week after being warned by the Israeli government that he could soon face war crimes charges there.
Israeli officials have identified more than a dozen instances where soldiers traveling abroad have faced war crimes complaints, they disclosed in a Knesset meeting on Monday, according to Israeli media reports. No soldier has yet faced any formal charges abroad.
The scrutiny and guidance comes at an unprecedented moment for Israeli soldiers, where both draftees and reservists have been conscripted to a war that has faced steep international condemnation. Despite guidance against posting footage from Gaza on social media, many have done so anyway, allowing pro-Palestinian activists to identify and lobby against individual soldiers and their actions in Gaza — including when they subsequently travel abroad.
An organization formed in Belgium during the war, the Hind Rajab Foundation, has taken the lead on identifying and applying legal pressure against Israeli soldiers who have posted potential evidence of war crimes on social media.
Named for a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed alongside her relatives in the war, the foundation says it “focuses on offensive legal action against perpetrators, accomplices and inciters of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.” The group said it filed a complaint against the Israeli soldier in Brazil a week ago, accusing him based on videos that it does not appear to have published but that it said showed him “participating in massive demolitions of civilian homes in Gaza during a systematic campaign of destruction.”
“This is not just about one man,” Dyab Abou Jahjah, the foundation’s chair, said last week in a blog post about a case it was pressing in Thailand. The case, he said, “symbolizes the fight against impunity for war crimes. As we move into 2025, we believe this will be the year of justice — a year when the tides turn against those who have escaped accountability for too long.”
Jahjah and the organization’s chair, Karim Hassoun, are longtime anti-Israel activists who have praised Hezbollah and Hamas and cheered the latter’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that began the current war. Jahjah told the New York Times two decades ago that he briefly trained with Hezbollah in his native Lebanon before moving to Europe, where he and Hassoun ran a now-defunct organization, the Arab European League, that deployed tactics including holding protests in Jewish neighborhoods and publishing antisemitic cartoons.
The foundation’s accelerating impact in the legal sphere has alarmed Israeli officials, who held an emergency meeting on Monday.
“What we are seeing before our eyes is a systematic and antisemitic system aimed at denying Israel’s right to self-defense. Countless international actors and many countries are partners in this,” tweeted Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
Saar was responding to criticism from Yair Lapid, the former prime minister and opposition leader, who said the reports of the soldier fleeing Brazil represented an indictment of the sitting government.
“The fact that an Israeli reservist was forced to flee Brazil in the dead of night to avoid being arrested for fighting in Gaza is a huge political failure by an irresponsible government that simply doesn’t know how to work,” Lapid tweeted. “How did we get to the point where the Palestinians are better than the Israeli government in the international arena?”
He added, “It cannot be that IDF soldiers — both regulars and reservists — are afraid to go on a trip abroad for fear of being arrested.”
The widespread posting of social media content from the front lines in Gaza has fueled criticism of the Israeli army from the beginning of the war. Amir Tibon, a journalist who survived the Oct. 7 attack and is critical of the current government, said the posts reflect a breakdown in Israeli military culture.
“This is a symptom of the Israeli military’s loss of discipline and the growing disdain of many soldiers, both in mandatory service and the reserves, toward the Israel Defense Forces’ top brass,” he wrote in Haaretz, the liberal newspaper.
“Ignoring the warnings of senior commanders and legal aides, who have been saying for months that this phenomenon endangers the soldiers, could come with a heavy price,” he added. “It almost happened in Brazil, and it will happen somewhere else sooner or later.”
Those pursuing legal action against IDF veterans abroad are casting a wide net. The Hind Rajab Foundation said in October that it had named 1,000 Israeli soldiers and cited more than 8,000 pieces of evidence in a complaint filed at the International Criminal Court. The court issued arrest warrants in November against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over their conduct related to Gaza, meaning that they could risk arrest in international travel. Several countries in Europe and elsewhere have said they will abide by the warrant for Netanyahu while others have rejected it.
“In the eyes of the pro-Palestinian organizations active in those countries, every IDF soldier is a target,” Nitsana Darshan Leitner, an attorney who heads Shurat HaDin Israeli Law Center, which uses litigation to advance Israel’s interests abroad, told Israel’s Channel 12. She said soldiers who have served in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, which the Israeli army closed to civilians, were particularly vulnerable.
In one widely publicized instance, a soldier traveling in Sri Lanka fled abruptly on Israeli officials’ advice last month. The soldier had posted a video of what he said was a dead civilian as fellow soldiers jokingly called him “The Terminator,” according to the Hind Rajab Foundation.
Israeli authorities also reportedly advised a reserve officer to leave Cyprus in November. He had reportedly posted from Gaza, “We’re here in Rafah — we won’t stop until we burn all of Gaza.”
Soldiers have also faced legal pressure in South Africa, Belgium, the Netherlands, Serbia, Ireland and France, according to Israeli media reports.
Not all of the scrutiny on Israeli soldiers abroad appears to have been driven exclusively by the Hind Rajab Foundation. A different pro-Palestinian legal collective in Chile, whose government is staunchly critical of Israel, is pressing for the arrest of an Israeli soldier reportedly in the country now.
In another case, soldiers reported facing scrutiny from border authorities in other countries, as opposed to sanctions once they arrived. Last month, two soldiers returned to Israel without getting visas to enter Australia after facing an unusual barrage of questions about their army experience, fueling questions about whether Australia is applying additional scrutiny to IDF personnel because of the war.
And earlier this year, France announced a commitment to investigating and prosecuting French-Israeli soldiers who are accused of war crimes in Gaza, following footage that went viral on social media of soldiers flaunting potentially illegal treatment of prisoners. Over 4,000 soldiers in the Israeli army have French citizenship, according to a 2018 report by the French newspaper Libération.
“I would like to provide clarification on the subject of French-Israeli soldiers engaged in the Israeli army,” Christophe Lemoine, a French foreign ministry spokesperson, said at a press conference at the time. “On this subject I would particularly like to recall that French justice has jurisdiction over crimes committed by French nationals abroad, including in the context of the current conflict.”
In one clip circulated by Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi, five people in Israeli military uniforms appeared to detain blindfolded prisoners with bound hands. A person behind the camera was heard saying in French, “Look, he’s pissed himself. I’ll show you his back. You’ll laugh — they tortured him to make him talk. Did you see his back?” Further footage showed a prisoner’s scarred back.
Tirawi identified the man who originally shared this video in a WhatsApp group of French Jews. He claimed that person was also the videographer, naming him as a culpable French-Israeli soldier to more than 100,000 followers on the social network X.
The man Tirwai named has denied any affiliation with the IDF and taken legal action against a politician who spread the accusation against him.
As reports of complaints against soldiers have piled up, Israeli media organizations have begun to publish guides for soldiers considering traveling abroad. In one published Sunday by Ynet, a prosecutor turned defense attorney at the International Criminal Court said soldiers should carefully consider whether they should travel to countries known to apply “universal jurisdiction” over crimes allegedly committed elsewhere.
“Some countries might treat seemingly minor content, such as racist songs, as incitement to genocide,” said the attorney, Nick Kaufman.
Leitner, the attorney, urged Israeli soldiers to remove war-related content, which she acknowledged could be seen as evidence of war crimes, from their social media accounts and to refrain from posting about their vacations abroad until they return home. She also called on the Israeli government to address the growing dynamic more proactively.
“I understand that they don’t want to arouse a sense of pressure and anxiety among IDF soldiers, but the problem exists,” she told Channel 12. “There is sufficient evidence to hold a legal hearing of war crimes in certain countries. Since it is impossible to predict them, the arrest warrants, like in Brazil, come as a complete surprise. The problem needs to be dealt with now.”
Shira Li Bartov contributed reporting.
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