An Israeli tourist has fled Brazil after a federal court for the first time authorized a criminal investigation into his actions as a soldier in the Gaza Strip, Israeli and Brazilian media reported Sunday.
Judge Raquel Soares Charelli authorized the probe on Dec. 30, news site Metrópoles reported. The reports in Brazilian media did not name the Israeli, who according to Israeli media reports has fled the country. He was wanted for actions allegedly taken during his military service in the Israel Defense Forces.
Israel, the United States and other countries have roundly rejected allegations that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza.
Yuli Edelstein, chair of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said in response to the Brazilian move that he would convene a classified discussion into the prosecution of Israelis abroad. “I am embarrassed for Brazil and its government, who surrendered to the pro-Palestinian legal terrorism,” the statement continued.
The former Israeli soldier, identified by Israel’s Channel 12 News only as Y., 21, traveled to Brazil as a tourist for the Chanukah holiday period together with three friends. He and his friends all left the country after receiving a warning from Israeli foreign ministry employees, according to Channel 12.
The man, who recently completed his mandatory service in the Israel Defense Forces’ Givati infantry brigade, survived the Nova music festival, where Hamas terrorists murdered more than 300 people on Oct. 7, 2023, including his girlfriend, according to Channel 12.
The allegations against him concern his actions as a soldier in a residential area of Gaza in November 2024.
Another complaint has been filed against an Israeli visiting Chile, Ynet reported on Sunday, though officials have not yet identified the man as a suspect or announced a criminal investigation in Chile.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has publicly compared Israel’s actions to those of Nazi Germany, and accuses it of committing genocide in Gaza.
Da Silva, who in May recalled Brazil’s ambassador from Israel, is persona non-grata in the Jewish state, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in February.
The complaint in Brazil was filed by an anti-Israel group called the Hind Rajab Foundation. According to the Jerusalem-based watchdog NGO Monitor, the organization 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 Sept. 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.
