Background on HRF:
The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) was formed in Belgium in September 2024 by Lebanese-Belgian activists Dyab Abou Jahjah and Karim Hassoun. The organization is named after 6-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed in Gaza in February 2024 allegedly by Israel, though an initial Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) probe found there were no troops in the area at the time.
In an article in The Nation, in December 2024, Abou Jahjah claimed the mission of the HRF is “to make sure that the soldiers who murdered Hind meet justice—alongside their leaders and every other IDF murderer.”
The HRF focuses on doxxing and launching legal cases against Israelis who have served in the IDF (military service is mandatory in Israel), and has to date submitted legal cases and petitions in eight countries against 28 individuals for alleged “war crimes.” On October 12, 2024, the HRF announced that it had submitted complaints to the International Criminal Court (ICC) against 1,000 Israeli soldiers. The organization has encouraged countries involved in the ICC case against Israel to issue arrest warrants against those it named.
Following the November 2024 pogrom in Amsterdam against visiting Israeli soccer fans, HRF filed a complaint against the Israeli fans, claiming “incitement to hatred,” “genocidal rhetoric,” “hate speech,” and “property destruction.”
While presenting himself as a civil rights activist, Dyab Abou Jahjah joined and received military training from Hezbollah before moving to Belgium, has repeatedly venerated Hezbollah and its late leader Hassan Nasrallah on social media, justified the October 7 massacre, denying that Hamas committed any rapes or "systematic slaughter" and has argued it is not antisemitic to say "effing Jews."
Who is Dyab Abou Jahjah?
Dyab Abou Jahjah was born in Lebanon, where he joined Hezbollah, and “had military training”, something he is “proud of.” In 1991, he moved to Belgium.
In 2000, he co-founded the Arab European League (AEL) with Karim Hassoun, (pictured below at a mock funeral for Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, held outside the Kazerne Dossin memorial and museum in Belgium, which marks the sight of a Nazi transit camp used for transporting Jews and Romani people to Auschwitz-Birkenau).
In 2002, Abou Jahjah was arrested in Antwerp, Belgium for inciting riots and resisting arrest. In 2004, Salon reported that another of the co-founders of the AEL, Ahmed Azzouz, had “threatened” an “almost unpreventable” attack on Antwerp’s Jewish community if it did not “cancel its support for Jewish policy as fast as possible and distance itself from Israel.”
Although Abou Jahjah claims to be a secular critic of Islamism, the 2004 Salon article quotes his desire for a “sharocracy” (a reference to Sharia Law) in Europe, in which “the sale of alcohol” and “sexually suggestive advertising” would be banned.
Abou Jahjah is also on record as saying that 9/11 gave him a “sweet feeling of revenge.”
In a January 2006 article on the AEL website, Abou Jahjah wrote that Europe had made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping” into an “alternative religion.”
The same year, Abou Jahjah travelled to Lebanon, having indicated a desire to rejoin Hezbollah to fight Israel in the Second Lebanon War, sparking calls for the withdrawal of his Belgian passport for treason. In an interview with Vrij Nederland, Abou Jahjah stated that “in Lebanon […] I was close to the camp of Hezbollah and its allies. They have power and then doors open.”
Upon returning to Belgium, he joined an Iranian regime-funded, Hezbollah-linked group called the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine (IUPFP).
Also in 2006, the AEL published a series of antisemitic and Holocaust-denying cartoons in The Netherlands, claiming that this was in response to the Danish Cartoon controversy earlier that year. One AEL cartoon portrayed Hitler in bed with Anne Frank, with the caption “write this one in your diary Anne!” Another cartoon portrayed two men standing over a pile of skeletons, with one saying, “I don’t think they’re Jews” and the other replying “we have to get to the 6000000 somehow!”
Claiming to go after “the West’s own ‘sacred cows’”, Abou Jahjah wrote, “I call upon every free sole [sic] among Arabs to use the Danish flag as a substitute for toilet paper. To illustrate every wall with graffiti making fun of everything Europe holds as holy: dancing rabbis on the carcasses of Palestinian children, hoax gas-chambers built in Hollywood in 1946 with Steven Spielberg’s approval stamp, and Aids spreading fagots (sic)."
On October 18, 2023, Abou Jahjah stated in a Facebook post. “I cannot bear to hear what they call the Hebrew language. Its sound grates on my ears like a discordant noise […] It is an artificial monstrosity, a Frankenstein of a language, hideous in its essence, just like that illegitimate state whose official language it claims to be.”
Despite claiming to differentiate between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Abou Jahjah has nevertheless defended the singling out of Jews, and compared Jews to Germans during World War II, saying “Not everyone saying, ‘effing Jews’ is antisemitic […] When, in their anger at the injustice committed by the “Jewish State,” such a person says, “Effing Jews,” it is not necessarily antisemitic. It is like when people said, “Effing Germans” in 1943; they did not necessarily hate Germans.”
In 2009, Abou Jahjah signed an open letter demanding the “unconditional removal of Hamas and all other Palestinian liberation organizations from the European list of proscribed terrorist organizations.”
Support for October 7:
On October 7, 2023, Abou Jahjah justified Hamas’ attacks on Israeli kibbutzim as they were unfolding, calling the communities “settlements” and claiming that the Hamas militias were returning “refugees.” 
Well after the nature of the October 7 attack became clear, Abu Jahjah continued to justify and support it, saying “anyone calling October 7 ‘a pogrom’ or an antisemitic attack is playing into Israeli propaganda […]”
He has also tried to diminish and excuse the October 7 attack, saying that it involved “no planned or systematic slaughter”, that “the orders to Hamas fighters was not to attack civilians” and that “no babies were deliberately killed […] Nor were any women raped”.
Support for Terrorists:
The day after the killing by Israel of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, Abu Jahjah eulogized him in an X post, praising Hezbollah’s support for Hamas and for its role in the Syrian civil war, in which Hezbollah supported the Assad regime, leading to multiple atrocities, including the mass killing and starving of Palestinians in the Yarmouk refugee camp.
Likewise, the day after Israel killed Hamas leader and architect of the October 7 attacks, Yahya Sinwar, Abou Jahjah eulogized him, calling him a “resistance leader” who “showed the way.”
