logo
Belgium questions 2 Israelis at music festival over Gaza crime allegations

Belgium questions 2 Israelis at music festival over Gaza crime allegations

Independent5 days ago
Belgian police questioned two members of the Israeli army who were attending a music festival in Belgium over allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza, the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Brussels said in a statement Monday.
In a statement to The Associated Press, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said an Israeli citizen and an Israeli soldier who were on vacation in Belgium 'were taken in yesterday for interrogation and were released shortly afterward." It said Israeli authorities "dealt with this issue and are in touch with the two.'
It was not immediately clear why the Israeli Foreign Ministry referred to one civilian and one soldier, while Belgian prosecutors spoke of two Israeli army members. The whereabouts of the two people who were questioned was not immediately clear.
The case was hailed as a 'turning point in the global pursuit of accountability' by a Belgium-based group called the Hind Rajab Foundation, which has campaigned for the arrest of Israeli troops it accuses of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The group was named for a young girl who Palestinians say was killed early in the war by Israeli fire as she and her family fled Gaza City.
Israel says its forces follow international law and try to avoid harming civilians, and that it investigates allegations of wrongdoing.
In a written statement, the prosecutor's office said that the two army members — who were in Belgium for the Tomorrowland festival — were questioned after the office received legal complaints on Friday and Saturday from the Hind Rajab Foundation and another group. The prosecution office requested the questioning after an initial assessment of the complaints 'determined that it potentially had jurisdiction.'
The Hind Rajab foundation said it filed its complaints along with the rights group Global Legal Action Network.
The decision to question the two Israelis was based on an article in Belgium's Code of Criminal Procedure that went into force last year and grants Belgian courts jurisdiction over acts overseas that are potentially governed by an international treaty, in this case the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1984 United Nations convention against torture, the prosecution statement said.
'In light of this potential jurisdiction, the Federal Prosecutor's Office requested the police to locate and interrogate the two individuals named in the complaint. Following these interrogations, they were released,' the statement said, without elaborating.
It said it was not providing any further information at this stage of its investigation.
The news in Belgium came as the U.N. food agency accused Israel of using tanks, snipers and other weapons to fire on a crowd of Palestinians seeking food aid, in what the territory's Health Ministry said was one of the deadliest days for aid-seekers in over 21 months of war.
The death toll in war-ravaged Gaza has climbed to more than 59,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry. Its count doesn't distinguish between militants and civilians but the ministry says more than half of the dead are women and children. The ministry is part of the Hamas government, but the U.N. and other international organizations see it as the most reliable source of data on casualties.
Since forming last year, the Hind Rajab Foundation has made dozens of complaints in more than 10 countries to arrest both low-level and high-ranking Israeli soldiers.
'We will continue to support the ongoing proceedings and call on Belgian authorities to pursue the investigation fully and independently,' the group said in a statement. 'Justice must not stop here — and we are committed to seeing it through.'
____
Melanie Lidman and Isaac Scharf in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Aid groups warn against aid drops as Gaza continues to starve
Aid groups warn against aid drops as Gaza continues to starve

Channel 4

time7 minutes ago

  • Channel 4

Aid groups warn against aid drops as Gaza continues to starve

Sir Keir Starmer says the UK has plans to airdrop supplies of aid into Gaza and evacuate sick children – but leading charities say that will do nothing to reverse the deepening starvation. The United Nations says it has been unable to deliver and distribute urgently needed aid that's waiting at the border, because of Israeli restrictions and lack of safety. This report by Zahra Warsame contains highly distressing images.

The IDF are supreme in warfare, so their enemies wage lawfare instead
The IDF are supreme in warfare, so their enemies wage lawfare instead

Telegraph

time8 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

The IDF are supreme in warfare, so their enemies wage lawfare instead

Belgium this week detained and interrogated two Israelis at the Tomorrowland music festival. Perhaps the fictional Belgian detective Tintin would have been better tasked with handling the case, but it was apparently taken seriously by the equally cartoonish Belgian authorities. The allegations from anti-Israel campaigners were that the two Israelis served in the Israeli Defence Forces, arguably the most effective military in the world and, contrary to anti-Semitic histrionics, the most successful in avoiding civilian casualties. Statistically they are far better in their ratio of civilian to military deaths in conflict than either British or American forces, according to John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point Military Academy, who has spent a career analysing these things. It's curious, isn't it, that the hardline activists pursuing Israelis aren't targeting the 100,000 Druze or the several thousand Muslim and Bedouin Israelis who proudly serve in the IDF alongside their Jewish neighbours. But the IDF are predominantly Jewish and therefore treated differently. They can't be beaten on the battlefield so there are attempts to beat them on the field of lawfare. The seasoned legal antiheroes of the lawfare minefields, wounded occasionally by vicious papercuts and exploding judges, take no prisoners in their courtroom battles against Jews – as the International Criminal Court has shown. You might think the Belgians would be a little more cognisant of their own history before picking on any more minorities. The story of the Belgian Congo would have made Cecil Rhodes blush. The Second World War saw 28,000 Belgian Jews murdered during the Holocaust, from a total of just 66,000 living there in 1940. In Antwerp, in 1941, the Belgian authorities helped organise the conscription of Jews for forced labour in France and aided in the rounding up of Jews for the Nazis in 1942. But these lessons of the past are going unheeded. Won't anyone think of the hypocrisy? Quite a few Belgians join the French Foreign Legion. Has anyone ever prosecuted those soldiers? After all, the Legion's conduct in the Algerian Coup attempt of 1961 is hardly edifying. The UK of course is a world leader in lawfare. We have 147,000 serving military personnel but 177,000 practising lawyers! Our battalions of bewigged barristers vastly outnumber our bedevilled bearskins. The UK certainly isn't immune to this offensive targeting of Israel through the courts. A few months ago, British lawyers attempted to persuade Scotland Yard to prosecute some British Jews who have joined the Israeli armed forces. These are presumably young British Jews wanting to help protect fellow Jews from certain annihilation if no such force existed. Has anyone ever prosecuted Brits who joined the French Foreign Legion? Or those fighting for Ukraine today? Did anyone prosecute idealistic youths who went to participate in the Spanish Civil War? Of course not. Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy's posturing in the Commons this week demanding Israel adopt a ceasefire despite it being Hamas that has rejected multiple ceasefires, was itself akin to a pound-shop Lord Palmerston. Ironically of course Palmerston's reputation for 'gunboat diplomacy' originated in large part because he wanted to protect a Jewish British subject – Don Pacifico – from an anti-Semitic mob in 1850s Athens. Nowadays, by contrast, the only time the Foreign Office ever adopts an imperialist air is when it is disproportionately attacking the world's only Jewish state. Perhaps the Belgians should stick to making chocolates, although to be frank, if the originally Parisian Bond Street chocolatier Charbonnel et Walker are anything to go by, the French are better at that anyway.

Israeli gunfire and strikes kill 42 in Gaza as many of the dead sought aid
Israeli gunfire and strikes kill 42 in Gaza as many of the dead sought aid

BreakingNews.ie

time8 minutes ago

  • BreakingNews.ie

Israeli gunfire and strikes kill 42 in Gaza as many of the dead sought aid

Israeli airstrikes and gunshots killed at least 42 people in Gaza overnight and into Saturday, according to Palestinian health officials and the local ambulance service, as starvation deaths continued and ceasefire talks appear to have stalled. The majority of victims were killed by gunfire as they waited for aid trucks close to the Zikim crossing with Israel, said staff at Shifa hospital, where the bodies were taken. Advertisement Israel's military said it fired warning shots to distance a crowd 'in response to an immediate threat' and it was not aware of any casualties. Those killed in the strikes include four people in an apartment building in Gaza City among others, hospital staff and the ambulance service said. The strikes come as ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas have hit a standstill after the US and Israel recalled their negotiating teams on Thursday, throwing the future of the talks into further uncertainty. Palestinians mourn during the funeral of people who were killed while trying to reach aid trucks (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP/PA) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday his government was considering 'alternative options' to ceasefire talks with Hamas. Advertisement His comments came as a Hamas official said negotiations were expected to resume next week and portrayed the recall of the Israeli and American delegations as a pressure tactic. Egypt and Qatar, which are mediating the talks alongside the US, said the pause was only temporary and that talks would resume, though they did not say when. The United Nations (UN) and experts have said that Palestinians in Gaza are at risk of famine, with reports of increasing numbers of people dying from causes related to malnutrition. While Israel's army says it is allowing aid into the enclave with no limit on the number of trucks that can enter, the UN says it is hampered by Israeli military restrictions on its movements and incidents of criminal looting. Advertisement The Zikim crossing shootings come days after at least 80 Palestinians were killed trying to reach aid entering through the same crossing. During the shootings on Friday night, Sherif Abu Aisha said people started running when they saw a light that they thought was from the aid trucks, but as they got close, they realised it was from Israel's tanks. That is when the army started firing on people, he told The Associated Press. He said his uncle, a father of eight, was among those killed. Advertisement 'We went because there is no food… and nothing was distributed,' he said. Marwa Barakat (centre) mourns during the funeral of her son Fahd Abu Hajeb (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP/PA) Israel is facing increased international pressure to alleviate the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza. More then two dozen Western-aligned countries and more than 100 charity and human rights groups have called for an end to the war, harshly criticising Israel's blockade and a new aid delivery model it has rolled out. The charities and rights groups said even their own staff were struggling to get enough food. Advertisement For the first time in months Israel said it is allowing airdrops, requested by Jordan. A Jordanian official said the airdrops will mainly be food and milk formula. UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer wrote in a newspaper article on Saturday that the UK was 'working urgently' with Jordan to get British aid into Gaza. Aid group the World Central Kitchen said on Friday it was resuming limited cooking operations in Deir al-Balah after being forced to halt due to a lack of food supplies. It said it is trying to serve 60,000 meals daily through its field kitchen and partner community kitchens, less than half of what it has cooked over the previous month.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store