Hawzah News Agency—The interview below with the president of Hind Rajab Foundation has been conducted by Aljazeera.
Aljazeera: Does the pursuit of justice change with a ceasefire deal for you?
Dyab Abou Jahjah: Absolutely not, because crimes have been committed. Obviously, we are relieved that there is a ceasefire for the people in Gaza, that there will be a cessation of killing – however, the crimes have been committed and justice must be served.
So for us, nothing changes except that we will maybe have more possibilities to gather evidence now that there hopefully will be some form of end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Al Jazeera: You’ve pursued legal action in Thailand, Italy, Argentina, Brazil – how much progress have those cases actually made?
Abou Jahjah: We are at the very beginning of our legal action. The task is huge and the challenges are big.
However, we have already built a network of lawyers worldwide and also gathered and archived the evidence. Now it’s just a matter of proceeding against a huge amount of soldiers that we have in our database who committed war crimes in Gaza.
The cases that we have already filed in these countries have shown that there is a serious and methodical approach to trying to achieve justice.
The reaction of the Israeli side has been to smuggle soldiers out of these countries.
I think the last case in Brazil especially showed that we are not trying to create some, let’s say, symbolic form of legal action but that we are proceeding with vigor and that we really think these cases will eventually lead to some form of justice in a court of law.
Al Jazeera: On a more personal level, the Israeli minister for diaspora affairs and combatting antisemitism wrote on his X page what’s been seen as a threat to kill you, saying “Watch your pager.” How is that affecting you personally and how your foundation operates?
Abou Jahjah: When it comes to the impact on myself, obviously it has a lot of impact because we are taking these threats seriously – they are coming from a minister.
They are unfortunate, of course, because I think the best answer to legal action would be to hire good lawyers. Obviously, this is not the MO of this current Israeli government but, of course, it impacts my life, and my family, as I’m living under draconian security measures.
But this is irrelevant to our work as a foundation. The HRF is bigger than any person, it is not dependent on me or anybody else.
The work continues, this does not affect our work in any way … Threats and intimidation will not change anything. If anything, they will give us even more motivation to continue.
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