The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) is leading a global legal campaign against Israeli soldiers involved in war crimes, increasingly forcing these troops to avoid international travel or risk arrest - and denying Israel the legal impunity it desperately seeks.
On 4 January, Israeli reservist Yuval Vagdani and his friends had to abruptly end their “dream vacation” in Brazil and escape to neighboring Argentina under cover of darkness. The local Israeli embassy had been tipped off that the federal court in Brasilia was preparing an arrest warrant against Vagdani for war crimes committed during his tour of duty with the Givati Brigade in the north of Gaza.
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reportedly played a critical role in helping Vagdani escape prosecution, violating Brazilian sovereignty by arranging for him to be smuggled out of Morro de Sao Paulo in the state of Bahia, into Argentina, and from there to Miami before eventually landing back in Israel.
A few days before his late-night escape, Brazilian judicial authorities were presented with a 500-page report that collected Vagdani’s own social media posts as evidence of his crimes. In these, the Israeli reservist gleefully presents himself planting explosives and detonating entire residential buildings in the north of Gaza, where the Israeli army spent months killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroying nearly all civilian infrastructure.
Although his crimes were not committed in Brazil, which is a state signatory to international treaties such as the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute, the country adhered to its legal responsibility to investigate and take the appropriate judicial action.
The Brazilian court case became a landmark in the global fight against impunity for Israeli soldiers and officials who are responsible for the world’s first-ever live-streamed genocide. Over recent months, dozens of similar complaints have been filed in many nations worldwide. From Sri Lanka to Thailand, from Sweden to Ecuador, individual Israeli soldiers find themselves in the bullseye of a global battle being waged inside national courts. (more...)
For Israel's criminal soldiers, 'nowhere to run, nowhere to hide'
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