The Hind Rajab Foundation, a pro-Palestinian organization that pursues legal action against Israelis traveling abroad, has filed a criminal complaint in the Netherlands against Knesset members Ram Ben Barak (Yesh Atid) and Moshe Solomon (Religious Zionist Party).
The complaint calls on Dutch authorities to investigate the two MKs over "public incitement to genocide." According to the organization, it was filed ahead of their participation in a conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is taking place this week in The Hague.
The organization claimed that the two "used their public status to promote a policy of uprooting the Palestinian population from the Gaza Strip and to make," it said, "statements that constitute incitement to genocide under international law."
The complaint against Ben Barak, a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee who heads the Israeli delegation to the conference’s parliamentary assembly, focuses on his November 2023 proposal to promote the "voluntary migration" of Gaza residents to countries worldwide.
The organization claimed that, given wartime conditions in Gaza, such a policy would not amount to voluntary migration but to forced displacement. It said this falls under the definition of incitement to genocide.
The foundation also targeted Solomon over his support for renewed Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip and his opposition to Palestinian sovereignty there. In the organization’s view, those positions amount to support for demographic change that could only be carried out through the continued killing and uprooting of Palestinians.
Foundation seeks investigations, arrest warrants while Israelis are outside of Israel
The complaint is the latest move by the HRF against Israeli public figures and senior officials abroad. Over the past two years, the organization has filed criminal complaints in several countries against IDF soldiers, officers, ministers, and Israeli public figures, seeking to prompt investigations and arrest warrants while they are outside Israel.
"Their participation in a conference whose subject is international law stands in contradiction to their alleged actions," said Dyab Abou Jahjah, who founded the "March 30" movement and its subsidiary organization, the HRF.
Abou Jahjah is a Shi'ite Muslim close to Hezbollah who has been banned from entering the UK and appears on a list of people prohibited from boarding flights that pass through US airspace.