Inside the Hind Rajab Foundation, the organization hunting Israeli war criminals around the globe

David Kattenburg

Mondoweiss  /  January 29, 2025

A year ago today, six year old Hind Rajab was killed by an Israeli tank as she hid for safety in Gaza. Today, a Belgian foundation is hunting Israeli war criminals in her name.

It was a dreadful way for a little girl to die – crouching in the back of a crushed, bullet-ridden car, stranded at a Gaza intersection, meters away from an Israeli Merkava tank; her aunt and uncle dead in the front seat; four cousins slumped over beside her, seeping blood; pleading to a Palestinian dispatcher on the other end of a cell phone line, begging for help, crying that she was scared.

Then, in a flash, ripped to shreds by a torrent of machine gun rounds – possibly American.

Hind Rajab was killed one year ago today. She was six years old.

Now, a foundation established in Hind’s name is seeking justice, not just for Hind, but for the countless Palestinians killed by Israel in contravention of international law.

But the foundation isn’t going after Israel as a state, it’s taking a different approach – going after Israeli soldiers themselves.

In an October 8 filing to the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, the Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation has identified a thousand Israeli soldiers it thinks the court should prosecute, based on 8,000 pieces of evidence, including the soldiers’ own social media posts from ravaged Gaza.

Among the acts Israeli recruits and officers have crowed about on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Telegram and other social media networks: indiscriminate bombing; targeted killing of non-combatants, including medical personnel, journalists, and civilians waving white flags; wanton destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, markets, and mosques; forcible starvation, and looting.

A Google search for ‘Israeli soldiers cheer as they blow up building” yields this and this and this, among many other posts of the same sort.

The callousness with which Israeli soldiers have openly and publicly celebrated their war crimes, probably thinking they would get away with it, is precisely what the Hind Rajab Foundation is banking on to hold these soldiers to account.

Mondoweiss spoke about the Hind Rajab Foundation’s work with its lead attorney, Haroon Raza.

An outgrowth of the March 30 Movement, the Foundation has been monitoring Israeli war crimes in Gaza since December 2023, assisted by a network of activists and lawyers around the world.

“That’s the strength of our organization,” Raza told Mondoweiss.

“There are thousands of us. We have a very large network internally and externally of investigators. And because of that, we have enough manpower to keep tabs on nearly everybody.”

“We have eyes and ears everywhere — literally.”

Those eyes and ears are focused on the social media accounts of soldiers who’ve served in Gaza since Israel’s war began, fifteen months ago – a plausibly genocidal war, the International Court of Justice ruled a year ago this week, three days prior to Hind Rajab’s brutal killing.

“They all have social media,” Raza told Mondoweiss, “and many of them were just, you know, putting group selfies and group photos and showing exactly where they were and what they were doing,” Raza says.

“So you hear the guy, you see a selfie guy, men and women, and then they blow it up and then they cheer,” says Raza, referring to one video provided to the ICC by the foundation.

Alongside incriminating videos and still images, the Foundation is documenting dates, times, and precise locations in Gaza, cross-referencing these to other posts by the same soldiers.

“This isn’t rocket science,” Raza told Mondoweiss, referring to one soldier in particular.

“We could track his movements, and we could verify that he had in fact been there on that day — let’s say Rafah on that day, let’s say in May 2024 – and in northern Gaza on that day. And therefore, his account was amplified by the rest of the evidence he had provided.”

The Internet never forgets

Wise to the work of the Hind Rajab Foundation, Israeli military chiefs have ordered soldiers to stop boasting about their crimes over concerns that they may be detained or prosecuted while traveling abroad

“[The] IDF or IOF leadership asked them officially, not to stop committing war crimes … They didn’t ask them to do that,” Haroon Raza told Mondoweiss.

“They asked them to stop publishing what they were doing. And that makes it easier for us. That proves intent. It proves that they know what their soldiers, men and women, have been doing. That they’re not ashamed of that, but they just don’t want them to get into trouble.”

Soldiers may be heeding that advice.

“It’s interesting to see them deleting everything,” says Raza, “knowing that they committed crimes. But they forget, the Internet has a long memory and we’ve had enough time.”

“[We] have a massive database of information now which has been verified, which has been double-checked through the information we’ve already had,” Raza told Mondoweiss. “And all we have to do is drop a complaint on the basis of the evidence which we can see and hear in moving pictures as well as stills.”

Among the thousand named soldiers in the Hind Rajab Foundation’s ICC filing are a host of officers and commanders, including thirty-three dual Israeli-foreign nationals, a dozen each from France and the U.S., four from Canada, three from the UK, and two from the Netherlands.

These are just the tip of the iceberg.

“[A] large percentage of the Israeli population does have dual nationality,” Raza told Mondoweiss. “Many of them are immigrants from the U.S., from Holland, from other countries. So because of that, the actual number will be much more than thirty-three.”

The Foundation has forwarded its list of Israeli soldiers to ten different countries that Israeli soldiers call home, or tend to go to after their military service is complete, for rest and rehabilitation; countries that exercise universal jurisdiction over the most serious international crimes.

A successful nab is only a matter of time, says Raza. “I expect it to be within a few months.”

“These IOF soldiers go on holiday, sometimes using connecting flights … especially if they want to go to Bali or wherever,” says Raza. “All we have to do is check out the region that he or she is in, check out what the most popular flight pattern is, and then lodge a complaint.”

Complaints have been filed in Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Thailand, and Ecuador.

Several attempted arrests, in Brazil and Argentina, have failed to materialize, after soldiers were tipped off, and fled.

A successful nab is only a matter of time, says Raza.

“I expect it to be within a few months.”

The Foundation is also targeting accomplices and inciters of Israeli war crimes. Among these, fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv football team who rioted in Amsterdam last Fall, and a rabbi/soldier in Israel’s Givati Brigade who boasted about destroying entire Gaza neighbourhoods, and endorsed the killing of Palestinian civilians.

False sense of security

Like old Nazi war criminals hiding out in Paraguay, Canada or Europe, seemingly invulnerable, Israeli soldiers have a false sense of security, says Haroon Raza.

“Let them try us out,” Raza told Mondoweiss. “We’re on their case. We’re tracking them. If they touch any country with universal jurisdiction or any country which is inclined to prosecute, we’ll legally pounce on them.”

“We have pledged one thing to ourselves and to each other: We’re not going to rest until our dying day, until we’ve got everybody. Of course, including those people who are responsible for the murder of Hind Rajab” – Haroon Raza

Will the Israeli tank gunner responsible for the cruel murder of Hind Rajab, face justice?

Haroon Raza thinks so.

“I’ll tell you why,” he said.

“When there’s universal jurisdiction, especially connected to war crimes or crimes against humanity, normally there isn’t a statute of limitations in the national legislation. So that means, even if we find out after twenty years, just like Simon Wiesenthal did, we can still pursue them. And that is actually what we are … We are the Gaza Simon Wiesenthal Center, if you will.”

“Which means, just like [Simon Wiesenthal] did … regarding the Shoah and Holocaust, he had patience, and he had perseverance, and so do we. And we have pledged one thing to ourselves and to each other: We’re not going to rest until our dying day, until we’ve got everybody. Of course, including those people who are responsible for the murder of Hind Rajab. So it’s our promise to her, to her family, and to the Palestinian people that justice will be served.”

The Hind Rajab Foundation welcomes volunteer organizers and social media experts – and especially lawyers.

David Kattenburg is a university science instructor and radio/web journalist based in Breda, North Brabant, The Netherlands