Israeli Reservist’s Athens Vacation Becomes a War Crimes Test Case for Greek Courts

Oran Rubin was on summer vacation at Athens when a legal group in Brussels accused him of war crimes. The Israeli reservist had photographed himself in the ruins of Gaza City, the group says, and it filed a complaint asking Greek authorities to open an investigation for war crimes and genocide before he could leave Greek territory. Greek prosecutors said no.Now the Hind Rajab Foundation, a Brussels-based group that monitors Israeli soldiers’ social media posts and files criminal complaints wherever they travel, has taken that refusal to the Athens Court of Appeals.The judges’ answer will help settle whether a country with no stake in a war can open a criminal case against a foreign soldier who walks through its airport.The foundation filed its complaint on September 1 through an Athens lawyer, Evgenia Kouniaki. Eight days later, the group says, the chief prosecutor of the Athens Misdemeanor Court dismissed it as legally unfounded, concluding that Greek courts lack jurisdiction because the alleged acts took place abroad and involved a foreign national.The foundation filed its appeal late last month. No hearing date has been publicly announced.All of this raises a larger question: When does a soldier’s social media post become evidence of a war crime, and which country gets to decide?The Case Built From a Soldier’s Own PhotosAccording to the foundation’s complaint, Mr. Rubin served in the 424th “Shaked” Battalion of the Givati Brigade, which operated under the 401st Brigade Combat Team. The foundation’s case rests on photographs it says he took of himself in Gaza City. In one, he stands atop the rubble of Palestine Square at the Rimal neighborhood. In others, he is in front of and inside Al-Taqwa Mosque at Sheikh Radwan.The group claims that Israeli forces took control of the square on December 5, 2023, and destroyed the surrounding district over the following weeks. It says satellite imagery shows the mosque was destroyed between December 26 and 31 of that year.The allegations concern buildings, not killings. The complaint accuses Mr. Rubin of taking part in attacks on a place of worship and other civilian objects, and in destruction of property not justified by military necessity. The foundation describes these as war crimes under the Rome Statute and the Geneva Conventions and adds that, viewed alongside the wider devastation in Gaza, the acts amount to genocide.Israel and its prime minister have denied such accusations. Mr. Rubin has not been charged, and no court has made any finding about his conduct. Whether those denials settle anything is a separate matter for the law, which treats a narrow set of crimes as the business of every country.“International law entitles any country in the world to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide no matter where the crimes are committed, by whom, or against whom. That is the principle of universal jurisdiction, which has been around for 80 years,” a professor of international law and security at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Military Studies, Kevin Jon Heller, tells The New York Sun.The appeal argues that Greece clears the legal bar even though Israel never ratified the Rome Statute, the treaty that created the International Criminal Court. Greece is a party to the Geneva Conventions, which obligate member states to investigate and prosecute grave breaches. The foundation also cites Article 8(k) of the Greek Penal Code, which it says supplies jurisdiction over crimes committed abroad, and a 2011 law that wrote Rome Statute crimes into Greek law.The appeal also notes that the International Criminal Court is built to step in only when national courts cannot or will not act. National courts matter all the more, it says, because of political pressure on the court from the United States, which sanctioned the court’s prosecutor and eight of its judges last year after it issued arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his former defense minister.Not everyone accepts that a Greek court has any such power.“Universal jurisdiction is not a well-established basis for prosecution, absent a treaty authorizing it, which there is not,” a professor of law at George Mason University, Eugene Kontorovich, tells the Sun. He contends that even the few countries that allow it generally require a defendant to be a permanent resident, not a passing visitor.“Greece will almost certainly not exercise jurisdiction; the point of the cases is to harass Israelis, scare them, and make them disinclined to travel to demoralize them,” Mr. Kontorovich continues.The record in the Netherlands, where the foundation has filed more than a dozen complaints, lends skeptics some support. By early 2025, Dutch prosecutors had dismissed 11 complaints against 15 Israeli soldiers, some because the accused was in the country only briefly.A Campaign With Hezbollah ConnectionsThe Hind Rajab Foundation, named for a Gaza girl Palestinians say was killed by Israeli fire early in the war, was registered in Belgium in September 2024. It says its purpose is to end what it calls Israeli impunity. It combs through soldiers’ social media posts for evidence and files complaints in whatever country they visit. It has filed dozens of complaints in roughly 20 countries, and proceedings have opened in places including Peru, Brazil, Romania and Chile.The foundation’s general director and co-founder, Dyab Abou Jahjah, 55, was born in Lebanon and became a Belgian citizen after a brief marriage decades ago to a Belgian woman who later said she had been tricked into the marriage. In 2000, he founded the Arab European League, an Antwerp-based advocacy group. Israeli officials have accused the foundation of being run by Hezbollah activists.That accusation draws on a 2003 New York Times interview in which Mr. Abou Jahjah was quoted as telling the publication he joined Hezbollah as a young man and was proud of the military training he received.The foundation denies the claim, calling it a baseless smear campaign; it says he is not, and never has been, a member of Hezbollah. It is not clear how that denial squares with the interview. A 2025 New York Times article that references Mr. Abou Jahjah’s work and quotes him does not mention its earlier profile or his quote about Hezbollah ties.Mr. Abou Jahjah also reportedly said in the 2003 profile that “most asylum seekers invent a story and I said I had had a conflict with the Hezbollah leaders.”“It was just a low political trick to get my papers,” Mr. Abou Jahjah said.Greece, meanwhile, is no stranger to the foundation’s filings. As of June, before the Rubin complaint, the foundation counted five complaints against Israelis traveling in Greece. Two have reached preliminary investigation, a stage that precedes any decision to charge.One of those is a complaint against Major Yair Ohana, filed with the Supreme Court prosecutor on September 3, 2025. It was sent within weeks to an investigative unit in Corfu, where the foundation says it submitted new evidence in June. A complaint against Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, filed during an official visit to Greece in January, also led to a preliminary investigation at Athens. One of the Greek lawyers who joined that case testified in May.A third complaint, against a soldier, Naor Shlomo Dadon, was filed on September 19, 2025, while the foundation says he was attending a retreat in the coastal region of Magnesia. The foundation’s published accounts do not report an investigation. None of those accounts describe an arrest or an indictment.The campaign’s best-known result came in Brazil. A federal judge there opened an investigation in January 2025 into Yuval Vagdani, an Israeli reservist accused in connection with the demolition of homes in Gaza. He left the country the next day.Around then, the director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Eden Bar Tal, said fewer than a dozen soldiers had been targeted and no warrants issued, and dismissed the attempted arrests as a futile publicity stunt. The Israeli military has since barred news outlets from naming soldiers below a certain rank, requires them to obscure their faces, and has warned troops against posting about their service or travel plans.Where the Law Draws the LineWhether any of these files reaches a judge will depend as much on Greek law as on the evidence. Does it matter that Mr. Rubin was only visiting?“Being physically present in the country facilitates apprehension and prosecution, but it has no impact on the legality of the assertion of jurisdiction,” the director of the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech University School of Law, Geoffrey Corn, tells the Sun.In other words, Mr. Rubin’s presence in Athens would make it easier for Greek authorities to detain him, but it does not, by itself, give Greek judges the power to try him. That power depends on each country’s rules, which vary widely.“This is a matter of national criminal procedure,” a retired ambassador and distinguished fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Beth Van Schaack, tells the Sun.Put simply, Ms. Van Schaack says, some countries will act the moment a suspect steps off the plane. In the United States, any presence is enough to proceed. Others will open an investigation before the suspect ever arrives. Still others demand a more lasting tie, such as residence, and a short visit will not do.Mr. Heller says most countries need the suspect on their soil before they can begin an investigation, and he imagines Greece is among them, which would explain why the foundation waited until Mr. Rubin was in Athens.On paper, every country has authority. “In theory every country can exercise universal jurisdiction,” a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, Eliav Lieblich, tells the Sun.However, many countries require sign-off from their most senior legal officials, Mr. Lieblich says, and he believes the Greek case turns on whether, and to what extent, Greek law recognizes the power at all. He notes that courts customarily defer to a country with a regular claim over the suspect, so long as it has genuinely investigated, and that the question is often whether the investigation was genuine.Supporters argue that the objection that Greece would be playing international tribunal misses the point.“A country that prosecutes a suspect via universal jurisdiction is not acting as an international war crimes court,” Mr. Heller says.He notes that countries including the United States have prosecuted international crimes in their own courts since World War II, and that the Geneva Conventions require states to exercise universal jurisdiction over grave breaches. Israel itself invoked the doctrine to try Adolf Eichmann.Whatever the judges decide, their ruling will not bind any other country’s courts, but prosecutors and defense lawyers elsewhere are likely to read it closely.“This would of course place soldiers at higher risk of arrest when traveling to Greece, but also elsewhere,” Mr. Lieblich says of any affirmative ruling.Ms. Van Schaack says that if she represented a soldier accused of war crimes, she would advise against traveling abroad. However, any defendant would be entitled to contest the evidence and the basis for jurisdiction.For Israeli soldiers, the calculation is already changing.“There have already been several instances when the Israeli government has told its soldiers and officials not to travel to certain places for fear of this happening,” a distinguished professor of law emerita at the University of California, San Francisco, Naomi Roht-Arriaza, tells the Sun. A ruling for the foundation would be significant, she says. “This would probably add Greece to the list.”

Israeli Reservist’s Athens Vacation Becomes a War Crimes Test Case for Greek Courts

Israeli Reservist’s Athens Vacation Becomes a War Crimes Test Case for Greek Courts

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