Israeli soldiers on vacation are being investigated for war crimes in Gaza

An Israeli reservist left Brazil in a hurry this week after a Brazilian judge ordered an investigation into whether he committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli consular officials helped the soldier, Yuval Vagdani, fly out of the country Sunday after the order became public. It was prompted by a criminal complaint filed by a Belgium-based nonprofit group, the Hind Rajab Foundation, which “focuses on offensive legal action against perpetrators, accomplices, and inciters of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.”

On Wednesday, the Israeli military announced that it would no longer identify soldiers by name in the media, “fearing the arrest of soldiers abroad.”

Vagdani was deployed in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, which triggered Israel’s invasion of the territory in a campaign aimed at defeating and destroying Hamas.

According to the Hind Rajab Foundation complaint, Vagdani posted videos and photos to social media from Gaza showing that he had destroyed civilian homes and other buildings. The group claims those actions were a systematic attempt to impose unbearable living conditions on the civilian population, in violation of international law. (The New York Times has not independently verified that evidence.)

A Brazilian judge determined that the allegations should be investigated, and referred the matter to the federal police. Several similar criminal complaints have been filed against vacationing Israeli soldiers in recent months, including in Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Argentina and Chile.

Vagdani, whom the Times was unable to reach for comment, arrived in Israel on Wednesday.

In an interview with Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, he acknowledged posting the video of a building being blown up. “That’s what they saw and wanted to investigate me about,” he said. “They turned it from one house into 500 pages; they thought I’d murdered thousands of children and who knows what.”

Vagdani also told Kan he was at the Nova music festival near the Gaza border on Oct. 7, 2023, and escaped the massacre there.

Israeli officials downplayed the seriousness of the cases, noting that none of the criminal complaints had led to arrests. “We understand that part of this phenomenon is driven by pro-Palestinian activists and based on open source intelligence,” said Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, a spokesperson for the Israeli military.

The open source methods in question are social media posts, which pro-Palestinian groups are now using as evidence to request criminal charges against the soldiers when they travel abroad.

Universal jurisdiction

The combination of social media and international tourism — plus a very old body of law — could open up a new arena in international criminal law.

Universal jurisdiction, one of the oldest principles of international law, holds that certain crimes are so serious that any country in the world can bring a criminal case against the perpetrators. In the 18th century, that rule was used for crimes like piracy; in recent times, it has been used to prosecute genocide and war crimes.

Israel relied on universal jurisdiction to prosecute Adolf Eichmann, a senior Nazi official, for crimes against humanity committed during the Holocaust. Spain relied on it to demand the extradition of Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, to face charges of torture and other crimes. And in more recent examples, several European countries have relied on the principle to try Syrian officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Belgium has prosecuted Rwandans accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide in its courts.

For decades, those cases have been relatively rare and tended to target senior officials. “There has been this tendency to focus on the higher levels in order to maximize impact, and also because at the higher levels sometimes, actually, the conduct is better documented than the lower levels,” said Yuval Shany, a professor of international law at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

It was once difficult for a local prosecutor to obtain evidence of a war crime allegedly committed in another country. That changed with social media. “Technology comes to bridge the gap, because once you have filmed, documented yourself committing a war crime, it’s much easier to prosecute you, even in a court which is half the world away,” Shany said.

Experts say Israeli soldiers have uploaded videos and other images of themselves in Gaza saying and doing things that could be interpreted as evidence of serious crimes, including destroying civilian homes and property and calling for the expulsion or extermination of Palestinians.

While social media clips can be taken out of context or misinterpreted — and Israel has accused Hamas of using civilian infrastructure for military purposes — “some of them do look very bad,” Shany said. “There is this potential degree of accountability that we have not seen before in wars, simply because it was too difficult to generate evidence.”

However, while social media evidence is compelling, it is unlikely to be enough on its own to secure a successful prosecution, said Rebecca Hamilton, a law professor at American University and former lawyer in the office of the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court: “A social media post doesn’t make a war crimes case."

A new legal strategy

The Hind Rajab Foundation claims to have compiled evidence against about 1,000 Israeli soldiers. It also tracks their foreign travels on social media as they post about their vacations, then promptly files criminal complaints with the countries they are visiting.

Dyab Abou Jahjah, the chair of the Hind Rajab Foundation, said that soldiers who uphold international law have nothing to fear from his organization. “We are not organizing a witch hunt against Israeli soldiers,” he said. “We file cases against soldiers against whom we have evidence that they are individually responsible for war crimes.”

Unlike more senior leaders, lower-level soldiers do not usually have diplomatic immunity or the resources to research which jurisdictions may leave them vulnerable to war crimes complaints.

Of course, a nongovernmental organization filing a criminal complaint is not the same thing as a prosecutor actually pressing charges, much less an arrest or conviction.

The Israeli government has taken actions that suggest it is concerned about the criminal complaints. The government, which insists that its forces in Gaza have acted in accordance with international law, has formed an interagency team to assess legal risk for soldiers and reservists abroad. And the Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently issued a public warning to Israelis that their posts on social media could be used to bring legal actions against them in other countries.

These cases may not need to see a courtroom or even result in arrests to have an impact. The prospect that soldiers might be unable to travel abroad without risking prison is one that the public may find difficult to tolerate.

Traveling abroad is tremendously important to Israelis, said Shany. “So I think there is this idea that this is actually an unacceptable risk and that the government-slash-military has to make it go away.”