The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a criminal complaint in the United Kingdom against an Israeli reservist believed to be visiting the country, accusing him of war crimes allegedly committed during Israel's military campaign in Gaza.
The complaint targets Lidor Dafna, who served in the 603rd Combat Engineering Battalion. He is accused of participating in the demolition of a flour-producing facility in southern Gaza in May 2025, at a time when a blockade of the territory was contributing to widespread starvation.
The Brussels-based foundation said footage posted by Dafna on social media shows an Israeli military bulldozer demolishing wheat silos in southern Gaza. The organisation said it used that self-published digital content as the basis for the criminal filing.
The foundation is named after Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed alongside her relatives when Israeli forces fired on their vehicle in Gaza City in January 2024.
Natacha Bracq, head of litigation at the foundation, described the urgency of the UK filing. "If the authorities let him leave, he [Dafna] will go back and commit more crimes. When a state waves a suspect through its airport, knowing what is documented, it is breaching its obligations to prevent and punish genocide," she said.
The Metropolitan Police had not responded to a request for comment at the time of reporting.
The filing is part of a broader strategy by the foundation to test whether legal systems in countries outside Israel can be used to hold Israeli soldiers accountable for alleged crimes.
Bracq outlined the organisation's methodology. "Our starting point is simple: Israeli soldiers documented their own crimes. They've posted tens of thousands of photos and videos from Gaza and Lebanon on TikTok, Instagram, X and Telegram, often with their faces and names attached," she said.
The foundation said its collection and analysis process follows the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations, a set of standards developed by the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
"Our collection and analysis follow the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations. Then the real work starts: verification. We geolocate every frame against satellite imagery, matching buildings, roads, water towers, destruction patterns," Bracq said. Investigators then cross-reference military sources to link a suspect to a documented act.
Khaled al-Shouli, an international lawyer registered with the Jordanian Bar Association who represents Palestinian victims before the International Criminal Court, said social media material can carry evidential weight. "Its value does not decrease simply because it is a post on the internet, nor does it become decisive simply because it has spread," he said.
Al-Shouli cautioned, however, that establishing individual criminal responsibility requires more than placing a soldier at a location. "The crucial difference is the transition from proving the occurrence of the crime to proving the responsibility of a specific person for it, as the appearance of a soldier in a place does not alone prove his commission of the crime," he said.
For families of victims in Gaza, the pursuit of justice through international channels reflects a loss of confidence in internal Israeli accountability processes.
The grandmother of Hind Rajab, speaking from Gaza, dismissed Israeli military investigations. "The occupation [Israel] claims that it opens criminal justice or an investigation for their soldiers, [but] we are certainly not very interested in this topic," she said. "They just justify their positions to the world, but actually on the ground, I don't think anything happens."
She expressed support for the foundation's wider mission. "Hind is not the first child in Gaza. Hind means surely there are many crimes like hers and more. We support anyone who speaks in the name of childhood [and always supports] the Palestinian child," she added.
