Belgium Opens War Crimes Probe against Israeli Tourists

They were not arrested and were released without restrictions, but the investigation into the complaint against them, filed by the anti-Israel Hind Rajab Foundation group, continues, according to the report.

Israel’s Channel 12 reported that one of the questioned Israelis, who were not identified, told the television channel that Belgian police officers had assaulted the two, hitting them in the face. Belgium’s federal police did not immediately reply to a query by JNS requesting their reaction to the claim.

The UK-based Global Legal Action Network is also party to the complaints submitted to the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, calling for the two men’s immediate arrest and prosecution under Belgium’s universal jurisdiction laws.

The Hind Rajab Foundation claims the Israelis are implicated in attacks on civilians, forced displacement and the deliberate destruction of Palestinian infrastructure. Witnesses said that a group of Israeli men displayed the Givati Brigade flag at the festival.

The foundation gathers publicly available information on IDF soldiers, including military operations they participated in, with the aim of prosecuting them abroad.

The decision to open an investigation was based on an amendment to the Code of Criminal Procedure that took effect last year and “grants extraterritorial jurisdiction to Belgian courts to prosecute offenses committed outside our territory, particularly those covered by conventional international law, in this case the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 relating to war crimes,” the Federal Prosecutor’s Office told Le Soir.

The European Jewish Association [EJA], a Brussels-based group, condemned the initiation of an investigation.

“Once again, we are witnessing a disturbing double standard. We do not see the same zeal applied when it comes to individuals from regimes such as Iran, Turkey, China or even Western democracies involved in foreign conflicts. Why is it always Israel that is singled out?” an EJA spokesperson told the European Jewish Press.

“Belgium must remain a country where Jews and Israelis can feel safe and welcome, not a place where they are politically harassed under the guise of human rights,” the spokesperson said.

According to the Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor, the Hind Rajab Foundation was founded by Dyab Abou Jahjah, a longtime advocate of terrorism and purveyor of antisemitic hatred based in Belgium.

In 2015, Abou Jahjah called Antwerp’s mayor “a Zionist c***sucker” on X. He founded a Muslim European group, the Arab European League, that published on its website a picture of Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler, as well as a caricature suggesting that Jews invented the Holocaust.

The Jewish Chronicle of London has described Abou Jahjah, who famously posed for a picture while holding an AK-47 assault rifle in his native Lebanon, as a former Hezbollah combatant.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Abou Jahjah spoke of his “feeling of victory.” He has called Antwerp, which has a large community of Orthodox Jews, the “international capital of the Zionist lobby,” according to the Dutch NRC newspaper.