Yuval, a survivor of the Oct. 7 Nova Festival massacre and an IDF veteran of the war in Gaza, was relaxing in Morro de São Paulo, an idyllic island town in Brazil with a group of friends, when he got a call that disrupted what was meant to be a time of rest and recuperation.

There was a warrant for his arrest in Brazil for alleged war crimes, the Israeli Consulate in São Paulo told Yuval.

From that moment, he and his friends sprung into action to get out of the country. Over the course of a day, they made calls and traveled by land, and by Sunday morning, Yuval had crossed into a third country. 

Similar stories have occurred to IDF soldiers visiting Cyprus and Sri Lanka in the last two months, and an unknown number of IDF soldiers who are either vacationing or hold dual citizenship remain in the same danger in Chile, Thailand, France and other countries.

The organization hounding Israeli soldiers around the globe is called the Hind Rajab Foundation, and it has strong ties to Hezbollah. The foundation posted on its social media accounts a video of a building being blown up, without context, and claimed that Yuval “actively contributed to the destruction of homes and livelihoods” in Gaza.

The Brussels-based organization, founded in September and named for a 5-year-old Palestinian girl alleged to have been killed by the IDF in Gaza, takes legal action against what it calls “perpetrators, accomplices and inciters of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.” 

The Hind Rajab Foundation tracks IDF soldiers who posted photos and videos on social media from Gaza. When those soldiers post that they are traveling abroad, the foundation partners with local anti-Israel lawyers to petition for the soldiers’ arrest. 

In October, the foundation submitted a complaint to the International Criminal Court with the names of 1,000 IDF soldiers, claiming that they committed war crimes. The foundation also gave the letter to the embassies of eight countries that have taken an antagonistic stance towards Israel, including Spain, Ireland and South Africa, calling on them to issue Interpol arrest warrants against the individuals. 

The foundation has also sought legal action against politicians, including former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte; major corporations, such as Siemens and Philips; and pro-Israel organizations, such as Stichting Christen voor Israël (Christian Foundation for Israel) in the Netherlands, claiming that they are accomplices to war crimes. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans assaulted in the streets of Amsterdam were labeled by the organization to be “inciters,” subject to a police complaint in which they were blamed for the violence against them. 

The Hind Rajab Foundation is led by Dyab Abu Jahjah and Karim Hassoun, longtime anti-Israel activists with ties to terrorist organizations.

The Beirut-born Jahjah was once called “Belgium’s Malcolm X” by The New York Times for founding immigrant rights group the Arab European League, which was behind multiple riots in the streets of Antwerp at the beginning of the century, including violence against Jews in the city and burning an effigy of an Orthodox Jew. 

Jahjah told the Times that he joined Hezbollah as a young man. “I had some military training; I’m still very proud of that,” he said. He applied for asylum in Belgium at age 19, later admitting that he lied about a dispute with Hezbollah leaders in order to get into the country. In his application for political asylum in Belgium, he said that he “joined Hezbollah in the summer of 1988 in order to fight against the Israeli occupier of South Lebanon … He took part in military operations on Saturdays and Sundays, including commando actions in occupied territory,” and studied at his university on weekdays.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Jahjah betrayed confusion about the facts of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and geography of the region, posting that all of the Hamas terrorists massacring Israelis are “refugees whose parents were ethnically cleansed from these villages in 1948/1967. Anyone neglecting this fact … is spreading Israeli propaganda.” 

When Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last year, Jahjah posted on X that Nasrallah “liberated Lebanon … and allowed us to live in freedom and pride.” Jahjah said he “had the privilege of meeting Sayed Nasrallah once, in 2001.” As for Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, Jahjah posted that history will remember him as an example of “resistance leaders” who “showed the way. Millions will follow their path, hundreds of millions.” 

Jahjah once defended former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for calling for Israel to be wiped off the map, writing that “his position on this matter is the only possible moral one.”

He has said that Jews in Israel have a choice between “the suitcase or the coffin.” 

In 2017, Belgian daily De Standaard canceled Jahjah’s column after he supported a Palestinian terrorist attack that killed four Israelis, saying that “liberation of Palestine by any means necessary needs to take place.”

Jahjah has also called the Sept. 11 attacks “sweet revenge,” according to a dossier compiled by NGO Monitor, which tracks anti-Israel groups and their funders. He also said he “would have preferred that they had hit the White House and the Pentagon,” and that “America is the enemy of my people.” 

Jahjah had been banned from entering Britain because of his extremist views, including support for the killing of British soldiers – or “rejoicing the victory of people’s resistance against occupation,” – though that did not stop former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn from meeting with him.

Hassoun took over as chairman of the Arab European League in 2005, two years before it was disbanded following a conviction for publishing Holocaust denial.

On Oct. 8, 2023, Hassoun posted that the Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel a day earlier “are simply returning home and reclaiming their properties.” 

In December 2023, Hassoun posted that he “condemn[s] Hamas … for not having taken 500 or 1000 hostages instead of just 200.” He also claimed that “no evidence of Hamas rape has been provided to date.” 

In October, Hassoun, who is running for city council in Willebroek, Belgium, brought a coffin representing a dead Hezbollah terrorist to the Holocaust memorial at the site of the Nazi transit camp Mechelen. He has called for the end of Zionism “by any means necessary.” 

He has also been photographed wearing a Hezbollah hat and had photos of Nasrallah and Hezbollah terrorist Samir Kuntar instead of himself on his Facebook page, according to Belgian Jewish news site Joods Actueel.  

Both Jahjah and Hassoun signed a 2009 petition calling for “Hamas and all other Palestinian liberation organizations” to be removed from the European Union’s list of banned terrorist organizations. 

Jahjah has also encouraged Arab European League supporters to spread images calling LGBT people “AIDS-spreading f****ts.” An AEL official called for the death penalty for homosexuality. 

The attorney who petitioned against Yuval in Brazil is named Maira Pinheiro. In a video posted on Instagram last month, she spoke of defending members of the “internationalist workers group” accused of hate crimes after they distributed pamphlets in October 2023, about “the right of the Palestinian people to resist, including through armed struggle.” She claimed that this was an example of “collusion between Jewish Zionism and Christian Zionism … criminalizing people’s speech.” 

After the incident in Brazil, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called a meeting on Sunday of the Ministerial Subcommittee on Defense of Jews and Israelis Around the World to discuss Israel’s options. Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, who participated in the meeting, called the Hind Rajab Foundation a “vile organization masquerading as a human rights group while in reality harboring Hezbollah activists and Hamas supporters” and called on Brazil to drop its pursuit of arrests of IDF soldiers.

Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein called an emergency meeting, which took place on Monday. He said that the panel’s members warned for months that “the legal persecution based on false claims of war crimes will not stop with the prime minister or defense minister, will trickle down and will reach IDF soldiers. I am embarrassed for Brazil and its government that they gave in to pro-Palestinian legal terror.”

Edelstein demanded that the IDF and Foreign Ministry present a plan to address the threat to soldiers abroad.

Eugene Kontorovich, head of international law at the Kohelet Forum and an expert on universal jurisdiction, the kinds of laws that would allow countries to arrest visiting Israelis, told JI that “it would be helpful for the government of Israel to provide a list of countries that are very anti-Israel and have laws to exercise this kind of universal jurisdiction.” 

“Brazil is notoriously anti-Israel. Why go there, when you can go to Argentina? Why go to Ireland and not Hungary? Israel can help its friends and punish its adversaries by publishing a list of dangerous countries,” he said.

Kontorovich noted that Jahjah’s involvement in Hezbollah is a crime in the U.S., and he “would encourage the Trump administration to make clear that [Hind Rajab Foundation leaders] could be arrested for material support for terrorist organizations … The U.S. could even sanction people who have connections to Hezbollah.” 

If Congress passes laws sanctioning the International Criminal Court, they may include those who work with the ICC against the U.S. and its allies, and that could be the basis for sanctions on the Hind Rajab Foundation, Kontorovich added.

In the meantime, Kontorovich recommended that IDF soldiers like Yuval stop posting on social media, even if they are not doing anything illegal, because there are people who “think the whole war is illegal, so why give them material to use against you.” He also said people should not post their vacation plans: “That’s not giving in to the enemy, because social media is poison, anyway.”