In countries around the world, former and current Israeli soldiers, from lowly grunts to top generals, are being hunted by a shadowy organization that claims to have thousands of volunteers around the world seeking justice for Gazans.

Launched in September, the Hind Rajab Foundation has used social media posts by Israeli soldiers, officers, and reservists, in an attempt to have them arrested for alleged war crimes when they travel abroad.

Though the group has been largely unsuccessful in court, it has managed nonetheless to win widespread media exposure, allegedly caused a cabinet minister to rethink a trip abroad, and even prompted the Israeli military to create new rules to better protect troops’ privacy and keep them from being victims of doxxing — the practice of publishing someone’s personal information online to expose them.

“We have never before witnessed [an organized effort] on this scale or scope, and that has to do with the unprecedented scale of the war, the number of troops who were in Lebanon and Gaza, the age of social media, the virality of things, and how things are all connected,” a military source said. “It’s a new challenge, but we are handling it with the right seriousness.”

The foundation was started by Lebanese-Belgian nationals Dyab Abou Jahjah and Karim Hassoun, a former Hezbollah member and supporter respectively, who say they are seeking justice for Palestinians.

The Brussels-based pair claim to have thousands of volunteers around the world who scour social media posts uploaded by IDF soldiers, eyewitness testimonies, documentation by journalists, and reports by the United Nations to support their claims of war crimes and other types of wrongdoing.

“We turn, you know, social media posts, basically, into legal cases,” Abou Jahjah recently told the Democracy Now TV news program.

The organization is named after 6-year-old Palestinian Hind Rajab, who was allegedly killed by the IDF in the Gaza City neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa, on January 29, 2024.

The IDF denies being behind an apparent strike on the Rajab family’s car, though reports about her death nonetheless helped catalyze already potent protests in North America and Europe.

Israeli troops fought in Gaza for over 15 months following the October 7, 2023 massacre, which saw thousands of Hamas-led terrorists rampage across southern Israel, slaughtering some 1,200 people, taking 251 hostages, and sparking a war that has completely devastated the Gaza Strip and left Israel shaken to its core. Fighting has been paused since mid-January, though it is unclear whether the truce will extend beyond its early March expiration date.

Hamas-run health authorities claim that over 48,000 Gazans have been killed in the fighting, though the figure cannot be verified and does not detail how many of those killed were combatants.

Israel says its troops act in accord with international law and that the military does its best to avoid civilian casualties while fighting a terrorist guerilla force deeply embedded within the Strip’s population. It says allegations of wrongdoing are investigated internally, though critics say few soldiers are ever prosecuted or punished.

HRF uses social media both to find evidence of alleged crimes in cases where soldiers post content from inside Gaza or southern Lebanon, and to find out about soldiers who travel abroad and post about it online, allowing the group to file complaints in the relevant jurisdiction.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in January that it knew of 28 claims filed in eight different countries against Israelis linked to the war, with HRF thought to be behind many of them.

Separately, the group also filed complaints against 1,000 IDF soldiers, officers, and commanders at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Abou Jahjah said in October.

Allegations against the troops include the use of inhumane warfare tactics, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since war erupted in October 2023.

In January, the organization boasted that a complaint against Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli for allegedly “making terrorist threats” had forced him to cancel a planned visit to the European Parliament in Brussels.

Belgian officials said Chikli’s planned travel was not a state visit and so he would not have diplomatic immunity, should groups seek a warrant for his arrest.

HRF also recently asked Italy to arrest Maj.-Gen. Ghassan Alian, who heads the Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories, the Defense Ministry unit that oversees aid shipments into Gaza, among other roles.

Alian, who was in Italy on an official visit, maintained his original schedule for the trip, despite HRF’s attempt to pin him on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Israeli officials say many of the organization’s claims of taking legal action against soldiers are overblown.

The IDF closely follows the activism of HRF and similar groups, but does not consider it a major threat, The Times of Israel has learned. The army has signaled that it believes most claims against individual soldiers have petered out before reaching prosecution, due to a lack sufficient or substantiated evidence.

Nonetheless, steps have been taken to lower the risk of legal action against troops and reservists who travel abroad.

There is no explicit directive for troops not to travel abroad due to the threat posed by HRF. But the Israeli military recently announced that it would no longer allow soldiers to be identified by name in the media and the Foreign Ministry issued a public warning that social media posts could be used to bring legal action against them in other countries.

“Hind Rajab Foundation is very good at generating headlines,” said Michael Freilich, a Belgian lawmaker with the Flemish nationalist and conservative New Flemish Alliance party. “They try to make themselves bigger than they are. They are the darlings of the press, mainly because of their extreme rhetoric.”

Abou Jahjah and Hassoun have been activists together since at least 2000, when they founded the Arab European League, a Belgium-based political organization resisting societal integration for Muslim immigrants, which Abou Jahjah has described as “cultural rape.”

The group, which also has a branch in The Netherlands, has been accused of stoking antisemitism and supporting terror.

In 2001, Abou Jahjah met Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese Shiite terror group Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy group committed to Israel’s destruction.

“We spoke for only an hour, but his aura, smile, brilliance, and kindness are unforgettable. I am fortunate to have lived in his era and witnessed his leadership,” Abou Jahjah recalled on X, after Nasrallah was killed in an Israeli airstrike in September.

Abou Jahjah also took Hezbollah officials on tours in Europe to meet lawmakers for the Arab European League in 2009.

In a 2003 New York Times interview, Abou Jahjah proclaimed his Hezbollah membership and said “he was still very proud” of the military training he received from the terror group.

Hassoun is also on record supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, though he has kept a lower profile than Abou Jahjah.

Just days after the October 7 atrocities, Hassoun wrote on his X account, “I condemn Hamas for not having taken 500 or 1,000 hostages instead of just 200.”

According to Freilich, modern Belgium’s first-ever Orthodox Jewish lawmaker, Abou Jahjah and Hassoun are fringe figures in Belgium, even if they have the support of some pro-Palestinian movements, as well as that of some extreme-left Israeli organizations.

“The majority of the people, including the Muslim population, do not support them,” he said, noting that both had made unsuccessful forays into local politics.

“Abou Jahjah tried several times to be elected to office, but was unsuccessful. He was also fired from De Standaard, where he was a columnist, after he praised a car-ramming attack in Jerusalem where several Israeli soldiers were killed,” Freilich continued.

In the Belgian city of Willebroek, the Iedereen 2830 party was forced to boot Hassoun last month, after the mayor said he would not form a coalition with extremists.

Last month, Haroon Raza, an HRF attorney was dropped from a panel at the European Palestinian Network Conference held in Copenhagen. HRF claimed in a statement on X that his participation was canceled after information was “disseminated in the Israeli press, falsely linking us to resistance movements in Lebanon and Palestine” and that other invitees refused to participate in the same panel as Raza.

Nevertheless, HRF and its founders have still managed to tap into a wellspring of anti-Israel sentiment prevalent in Europe since the October 7 attack.

“The war has hardened public opposition to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and even turned many supporters of Israel into critics,” Khaled Diab, a Belgian-Egyptian journalist and author, told The Times of Israel. He described the conflict in Gaza as “the most unpopular war Israel has ever been involved in.”

Diab said that even if unsuccessful in court, the work of HRF can act as a “deterrent” to troops who “know they can potentially be pursued.”

Robert Neufeld, a post-doctoral fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions at the University of Haifa, told The Times of Israel that while no cases filed by HRF prove clear crimes of humanity or war crimes, the group “is a real threat and it should be dealt with as such. They are not something to dismiss.”

Neufeld, who served in numerous positions in the Military Advocate General Corps and the office of the Military Ombudsman, stressed that winning on the battlefield in Gaza is not the end of the story, as every case that they file and make public helps to damage Israel.

“They are trying to achieve much more than the specific person that they are after. They are trying to hurt or damage the IDF in general and they want to stop people from serving as combatants. They want to portray Israel as a criminal state and the IDF as criminals,” Neufeld said.

“We need to understand that wars are not only fought on the battlefield, but on social media, in the courts, and it affects Jewish communities abroad,” he added.

Anne Hertzberg, a legal adviser with the Israel-based NGO Monitor who has tracked the group since it emerged in September, said that she believes the main purpose of HRF is not to file lawsuits against soldiers, but “to deter, and harass, Israelis and Jews across the globe. That’s their purpose.”

“They are trying to disrupt Western security cooperation and cause trouble with Israel’s relationship with other countries. There are lots of things we don’t know about it, and we have to look into it. Every country where they are operating in, they need to be investigated,” she said.

Though the foundation is registered with Belgian authorities, little is known about how its activities are being funded.

“We don’t know who they are working with, what kind of occupational support is behind them,” said Hertzberg.

Both she and Freilich called on governments to examine who may secretly stand behind the effort. “This is not something they can do on their own, this isn’t cheap,” Hertzberg added.

Israel, meanwhile, is attempting to fight back in the court of public opinion. Right now, when one googles the name of the organization, the first result is a sponsored link that takes users to an Israeli government page with a report claiming to “unmask” HRF’s terror-backing founders.

“Israel should make it clear that Abou Jahjah and Hassoun are linked to Hezbollah,” Freilich said. “I hope that Europe will not stand for it, but it doesn’t seem to be a priority for the police or government at the moment. They don’t want to antagonize the largest Palestinian community in Europe.”

Neufeld cautioned that even if Israel manages to tear down Abou Jahjah and Hassoun, it would not solve the larger issue of groups seeking to prosecute Israelis abroad on war crimes allegations, trumped up or not.

“Tomorrow it will be someone else,” he said.