Israeli tourist Yuval Vagdani had to escape for the second time. On October 7, 2023, he survived the Hamas massacre at the Nova music festival near Gaza. Then in the first week of January 2025, he escaped Brazil ahead of a court-ordered investigation into his service as a military reservist in Gaza. He was vacationing in Brazil. Vagdani’s near miss is part of an international trend targeting Israeli soldiers with politically motivated arrests.
Brazilian attorney Maira Pinheiro, who filed the criminal complaint against Vagdani, has ties to an internationally designated terrorist group. She justified the October 7 massacre, saying Palestinians have “the right to resist, including through armed struggle.” Pinheiro endorsed “armed resistance” against Israelis in an October 2024 article coauthored with Rawa Alsagheer, the coordinator of the Brazilian branch of Samidoun, an organization sanctioned by the United States and other countries for serving as a front for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group. In July 2024, Samidoun shared a picture of Pinheiro sitting in the front row of an event at which Alsagheer spoke.
The organization that collected the information on Vagdani is the Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, which “focuses on offensive legal action against” Israelis. It has filed complaints of abuse and war crimes against Israeli soldiers in at least 28 countries, often using local lawyers like Pinheiro. In October 2024, it also filed complaints at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague against 1,000 Israelis.
The Hind Rajab Foundation has ties to another internationally designated terrorist group, Hizbullah, raising doubts about its commitment to international law and justice. The Foundation’s director, Dyab Abou Jahjah, has boasted about joining the Lebanon-based terrorist group: “I had some military training, I’m still very proud of that.” In a eulogy for Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Abou Jahjah said he met Nasrallah in 2001. He wrote on X that he used to organize visits by Hizbullah’s leadership to European countries.
Abou Jahjah previously made headlines as the founder and leader of the Arab European League. Under his stewardship, the League spread Holocaust denial by claiming that “hoax gas-chambers [were] built in Hollywood in 1946” to mislead the world about Nazi crimes in Europe. In addition, a Dutch court fined the League in 2010 for publishing a cartoon denying the Holocaust. In 2017, a Belgian newspaper dropped Abou Jahjah as a columnist after he expressed support for terrorism on X, advocating “any means necessary” to destroy Israel. Relatedly, Abou Jahjah issued a chilling call for ethnic cleansing in 2009, saying that Israeli Jews have a choice between the passport or the coffin.
Israelis and Jews are not the sole targets of Abou Jahjah. He expressed homophobia in 2006, referring to “Aids spreading fagots [sic].” In 2004, he said, “I consider every death of an American, British or Dutch soldier as a victory.”
Brazil’s and South Africa’s Records on War Crimes Arrests
Brazil has a muddled position on executing war crimes warrants. In September 2023, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has an ICC warrant for his arrest, could travel to Brazil for an upcoming G20 meeting without fear of detention. Lula later walked back his comments, saying his country’s judiciary was in charge of that decision. Meanwhile, Lula has shared many friendly phone calls with Putin since the ICC issued the warrant.
South Africa is another country of concern. In May 2024, then Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor told a crowd that South Africa would arrest South Africans fighting in the Israeli military. Two Israeli soldiers of South African origin have faced public harassment over their service in Israel’s military — one of them is even facing a police investigation. A report produced by Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Media Review Network, two South African anti-Israel organizations, justifies the October 7 massacre and identifies nine South Africans or individuals in South Africa who should be investigated for their Israeli military service.
In late 2023, South Africa initiated a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians. South Africa has also been a leader in using the ICC to punish Israelis for alleged crimes against Palestinians. Pretoria has even welcomed the ICC arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and former defense minister.
These initiatives demonstrate Pretoria’s hypocrisy. In 2015, South Africa declined to arrest then Sudanese Prime Minister Omar al-Bashir, wanted by the ICC for war crimes, even welcoming him when he visited Johannesburg.
Israel and other countries have argued that the ICC, in its arrest warrants for Israelis, has failed to apply its own principle of complementarity. According to this principle, the ICC may only exercise jurisdiction when national legal systems fail to do so, when it is demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to genuinely carry out proceedings. While Sudan under al-Bashir clearly did not meet this threshold, Israel has a functioning democracy and an independent judiciary. Since the start of the current war in October 2023, the IDF’s Legal Division has opened more than 85 criminal probes and hundreds of disciplinary probes and has reviewed around 2,000 incidents, one indication of the viability of the Israeli judicial system.
The international investigations against Israeli soldiers are the latest front in the war against the Jewish state. The incoming Trump administration should stand up to these lawfare campaigns, including by reimposing sanctions on ICC officials seeking to arrest Israelis and clarifying in bilateral relations with other countries that there will be financial and political consequences for these politically motivated actions against an American ally.
