French prosecutor drops complaint against Israeli dual national accused of crimes in Gaza
French prosecutors have dismissed a complaint from a group of NGOs alleging that a French-Israeli soldier committed crimes of torture and barbarism during the war in Gaza, according to a report in AFP on Tuesday.
France's National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office (PNAT) closed the complaint on 2 September, according to a judicial source cited by AFP.
The allegations were based on a video, dated January but shared on social media in March, purportedly posted by the soldier in question. It shows Israeli soldiers making Palestinian detainees - believed to have been kidnapped in Gaza - get off a truck. The Palestinians are dressed in white jumpsuits and blindfolded.
The person filming the video can be heard insulting the detainees in French, calling them "fuckers", "sons of bitches", "motherfuckers" and a "bunch of bitches".
"You saw those little sons of bitches there, look, he pissed himself," the French-speaking man says, adding: "Look, I’m going to show you his back, you’ll laugh. Look, they tortured him to make him talk. You were happy on 7 October [day of the Hamas-led attack on Israel], you sons of bitches."
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Three NGOs, the Belgian association March 30 Movement, the French Justice and Rights Without Borders (JDSF) and Al Jaliya Union of Palestinian Association in France, filed a complaint in April stating that the video showed complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
According to the judicial source, the complaint was dismissed due to facts being "insufficiently characterised", and supporting evidence "not being sufficient to establish the existence of possible material acts of complicity".
For Rafik Chekkat, lawyer for the March 30 Movement, the dismissal of the case by the PNAT is "incomprehensible" given the evidence provided in support of the complaint.
"A French soldier, Yoel Ohnona, filmed himself in Gaza while mistreating Palestinian prisoners. He showed the physical after-effects caused by torture on the back of one of them," he told Middle East Eye.
"A few days later, he appeared on an Israeli TV show to reaffirm that it was indeed him in the video. But the PNAT judged that there was not enough evidence to characterise the offence," Chekkat added.
The #March30Movement is profoundly shocked by the French National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office (Pnat) decision to dismiss our complaint against Yoel Ohnona, author of the infamous torture-boasting video. This is not the end of this.
— March 30 Movement (@March30Movement) September 10, 2024
For more info 👇🏾https://t.co/FByL6DMAo4 pic.twitter.com/busZU2c8h9
Gilles Devers, one of the claimants' lawyers, told MEE in June that the soldier who filmed the video was not only guilty of apology for torture, but of psychological torture by inflicting, through insults and degrading words, inhuman and bestial treatment on prisoners.
"International law considers physical torture on an equal footing with other acts that place individuals in a position of inferiority," Devers said.
'A very bad signal'
On Tuesday, the NGOs' lawyers told AFP: "We are astonished to learn of this dismissal, even though the complaint included all the elements to open an investigation. We will request access to the file to understand.
"With this decision, the PNAT shows a desire not to shed light on the involvement, in Gaza, of dual nationals in war crimes... This desire can only be political," the lawyers added.
For months, French campaigners have lobbied the government to take action over the presence of over 4,000 French or French-Israeli nationals fighting in Gaza since October.
The French government first dodged the issue, stating that France would not investigate its nationals enlisted in the Israeli army because "dual nationality is a double allegiance".
Then, on 21 March, when asked if authorities were planning to carry out investigations into French-Israeli soldiers potentially guilty of war crimes in Gaza, the deputy spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Christophe Lemoine, acknowledged that "French justice is competent to recognise crimes committed by French nationals abroad, including in the context of the current conflict".
Under the penal code, French citizens who are responsible for crimes or offences abroad can be prosecuted.
In 2010, the European Court of Human Rights rendered several judgments considering that the French public prosecutor is not independent of the executive power.
Despite a reform of the judiciary in 2023, the independence of the public prosecutor's office from the executive, particularly in matters of appointments and discipline, is not yet guaranteed and the public prosecutors want a reform of their status in this sense.
"When we see the casualness with which prosecutions for 'apology for terrorism' are initiated in France, there are really reasons to ask questions," Chekkat told MEE, in reference to the hundreds of investigations into remarks about the Israel-Palestine conflict launched by the French authorities since 7 October.
"Given the repression of the Palestine solidarity movement, the dismissal of the case by the PNAT once again sends a very bad signal and further damages the image of the judicial institution in France," he added.
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