[IsraelTimes] Yuval Vagdani was subject of probe for allegedly filming himself destroying residential building in Gaza; says having to flee Brazil ‘felt a little like a bullet in the heart’
The Israeli soldier who was forced to flee Brazil after the country’s Federal Court ordered police to open a war crimes investigation into him has returned to Israel, according to Hebrew media reports.
The soldier, who was named as Yuval Vagdani, landed in Israel Wednesday morning after he was forced to hurriedly end his vacation in Brazil. He spoke to the Kan broadcaster about his ordeal after he landed.
"I woke up in the morning, opened the phone and suddenly saw eight calls — the Foreign Ministry, my brothers, my mother, consuls," he told Kan. "I knew something was up."
Vagdani said he was in Brazil for his "dream trip" after a long stint in the reserves, and that he had planned the trip for over four years.
Being forced to flee Brazil "felt a little like a bullet in the heart," he said.
According to Channel 12, Vagdani was "smuggled" into Argentina
...a country located on the other side of the Deep South. It is covered with Pampers and inhabited by Grouchos, who dance the Tangle. They used to have some islands called the Malvinas located where the Falklands are now. They're not supposed to cry for Evita...
with the help of the Foreign Ministry, and from there was able to fly to Miami, and then Israel.
Upon arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, Vagdani told Channel 12 that he learned from his mistakes and wouldn’t upload videos from Gazoo
...Hellhole adjunct to Israel and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, inhabited by Gazooks. The place was acquired in the wake of the 1967 War and then presented to Paleostinian control in 2006 by Ariel Sharon, who had entered his dotage. It is currently ruled with a rusty iron fist by Hamas with about the living conditions you'd expect. It periodically attacks the Hated Zionist Entity whenever Iran needs a ruckus created or the hard boyz get bored, getting thumped by the IDF in return. The ruling turbans then wave the bloody shirt and holler loudly about oppression and disproportionate response ...
. "I won’t go back to Brazil again," he added.
The Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar had ordered the ministry’s Consular Section and the embassy in Brazil to contact the man and his family, and they "accompanied him throughout the event until his swift and safe departure from Brazil."
The complaint to the Brazilian court was reportedly submitted by the Hind Rajab Foundation, which is named after a 6-year-old girl, who was killed in Gaza in January. Her death was blamed on the IDF, but an initial probe conducted by the army said that there were no troops in the area at the time.
The organization identifies IDF soldiers via social media content they post from their operations in Gaza and then alerts local law enforcement when they travel abroad in an attempt to get them arrested and prosecuted for war crimes.
Its feed on X is full of soldiers it has identified by name and photo and the locations they have traveled to.
According to the Brazilian Metrópoles news outlet, Vagdani was being investigated in Brazil under suspicion of being involved "in the destruction of a residential building in the Gaza Strip while using explosives outside of combat" in November. The Hind Rajab Foundation claims the building allegedly destroyed with the soldier’s involvement was being used as a shelter for Paleostinians who had been displaced by the war and said its complaint consisted of more than 500 pages of evidence that the soldier was complicit in war crimes.
In a post on X on Saturday night, the organization urged Brazilian authorities to arrest the soldier, claiming that it had information that the Israeli government was helping the soldier escape the country, and that "there are also indications that evidence is being destroyed."
"They wrote that I murdered thousands of children and turned it into a 500-page document," Vagdani said. "All that was there was a picture of me in uniform in Gaza."
Vagdani was a survivor of the Hamas
 ..not a terrorist organization, even though it kidnaps people, holds hostages, and tries to negotiate by executing them,...
attack on the Nova festival on October 7, 2023, during the massive onslaught on southern Israel in which murderous Moslems killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war in Gaza. More than 360 of the victims were murdered at the music festival.
Vagdani survived the attack by running for many kilometers until he reached safety, narrowly dodging Hamas gunfire multiple times on the way.
On Sunday, the Foreign Ministry added that it "draws the attention of Israelis to posts on social media about their military service, and to the fact that anti-Israeli elements may exploit these posts to initiate futile legal proceedings against them."
According to Kan, none of the Hind Rajab Foundation’s accusations have resulted in any arrests, although its actions are of concern to the Foreign Ministry.
Courtesy of Grom the Reflective in comments a few days ago. I wanted to put it where it can be searched in the archives. The ex-Hezbollah terrorist behind Hind Rajab Foundation, doxxing IDF soldiers
[Jpost] A leaked Israeli Diaspora Affairs Ministry profile on Dyab Abou Jahjah described him as a "former Hezbollah operative."
Dyab Abou Jahjah,
…alternately Dyab Abu Jahjah, he emigrated to Belgium from his native Lebanon in 1991 in pursuit of higher education, then stayed on to cause trouble… the man behind the Hind Rajab Foundation, which has been doxxing Israeli soldiers and seeking legal action against them in foreign states, admitted to joining Hezbollah as a youth and implied that he was returning to Lebanon to fight in the 2006 war, according to press releases by his previous organization and an old New York Times interview.
The Arab European League (AEL)
…while it claimed to be pan-Arabist, attachment to Shiism and Iran appeared fairly early on. Active in Belgium and the Netherlands, they harassed police in the name of preventing individual and institutional Islamophobia, led anti-Israel protests that gleefully turned into riots since 2002, and instigated attacks on Jews. At one point they teamed up with a Maoist political party to run in Belgian elections, peaking at about a quarter of a percent of the votes, which was not enough to get a seat anywhere…. that he founded, according to the Internet Archive, shared on its website a 2003 New York Times profile piece in which the activist admitted to his Hezbollah affiliation. The article related that “he said, he joined the Hezbollah resistance against Israel.”
“I had some military training, I’m still very proud of that,” he told the NYT in 2003.
Abou Jahjah also admitted that he had lied about a falling out with Hezbollah leadership when he was seeking asylum in Belgium.
“Most asylum seekers invent a story, and I said I had had a conflict with the Hezbollah leaders,” he said. “It was just a low political trick to get my papers.”
A leaked Israeli Diaspora Affairs Ministry profile on Abou Jahjah described him as a “former Hezbollah operative.”Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli said on Sunday night that Abou Jahjah had previously declared ties to Hezbollah, and claimed that he had led “Hezbollah tours in Europe.”
According to NYT, Flemish Nationalist Party member Filip Dewinter described him as “a foreign agent, directed and paid from abroad.”
The Arab European League, which its founder described in a 2005 letter as “an Arab Nationalist organization that upholds Islam as a source of inspiration,” routinely published statements from Hezbollah on its website and articles praising the group, and appeared to have published a 2007 interview with current Hezbollah Secretary-General Naim Qassem.
Abou Jahjah has a long history of support for terrorist organizations besides Hezbollah, issuing support for the October 7 terrorist attacks.
“These Palestinian resistance fighters entering these settlements are all refugees whose parents were ethnically cleansed from these villages in 1948/1967,” he wrote on X/Twitter on October 7. “Anyone neglecting this fact is not seriously engaging in a conversation but is spreading Israeli propaganda, whether willfully or not.”
Abou Jahjah and Lebanon-born Hind Rajab Foundation co-founder Karim Hassoun both signed a 2009 appeal calling for the removal of Hamas and other Palestinian groups from the European list of proscribed terrorist organizations.
This call echoed 2002 AEL statements demanding that “all Palestinian resistance groups would be taken off the terrorist list.
“The decision of Europe to extend its so-called terrorist list to include Palestinian resistance organizations is totally unfair and unacceptable,” the league said.
“It is unfair because it is criminalizing the struggle of a people that is under siege and under attack by one of the mightiest armies on earth, a people fighting for its freedom with the limited possibilities it has. If you want the Palestinian people to stop using suicide-bombings, give it the possibility to destroy the tanks that are blowing Palestinian children into pieces.
“AEL will keep on supporting the legitimate resistance of the Palestinian people until the total defeat of Zionism and the total liberation of Palestine, and the establishing of a democratic Palestinian state with Jerusalem (Al Quds) as its capital and the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes.”
SUPPORTER OF HEZBOLLAH
CHIKLI ALSO noted on Sunday that Hassoun was also a supporter of Hezbollah, having been photographed wearing a Hezbollah hat and issuing praise of Samir Kuntar, who led the murders of members of an Israeli family in 1979.
“During his tenure as head of the AEL, the organization was convicted in a Dutch court for disseminating Holocaust denial content,” the Diaspora affairs minister said.
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