Two Israeli soldiers on leave in Amsterdam who posted pictures of themselves there online had to cut their trip short due to safety concerns after anti-Israel activists in the Netherlands circulated the images, the Israel Defense Forces said on Tuesday.
The IDF contacted the soldiers, both men in regular service, and instructed them to stay in their hotel room and prepare to leave the country, Israel Hayom reported on Tuesday.
Before traveling abroad, regular and reserve soldiers are advised by the army to remove from their social media images showing them engaging in military activity, Israel Hayom reported. They are also instructed to make their accounts private, avoid giving strangers access to those accounts, and to not post real-time location or photos from their vacations.
At least one anti-Israel group claimed that one of the soldiers in Amsterdam was a “war criminal,” but the concerns regarding the two soldiers were for their personal safety in the Netherlands and not from prosecution, according to the Israel Hayom report.
The Hind Rajab Foundation, an anti-Israel group that specializes in warfare against Israelis, said on X that they had planned to act “in silence” against one of the soldiers, “but after some large accounts online started tagging us with their pictures, the Israelis were alerted and immediately smuggled them out of the Netherlands.”
On Nov. 7, hundreds of Arabs and Muslims were implicated in a coordinated assault on dozens of Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam. The unprecedented incident demonstrated the ability of online communities to use text messaging to mobilize against Israelis and Jews and attack them, using real-time updates, pictures and GPS locations to target individuals.
