Rights activists on Tuesday filed a lawsuit at a Paris court alleging that two French-Israeli snipers committed war crimes in Gaza between November 2023 and March last year.
The two men, identified as Sasha A and Gabriel P, are known to be members of a 20-strong sniper group in the Israeli army’s paratroopers brigade known as the Ghost Unit, half of which is composed of dual citizens.
It stands accused of shooting at unarmed civilians in Gaza, acts that would constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, activists said.
The complaint, lodged at the war crimes unit of the Paris tribunal, is based on an investigation by Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi that he published on X in October last year. It includes an interview with a US-born sergeant who led the Ghost Unit.
“The fact that they are members of this elite unit under the orders of this sergeant indicates that they are authors, or co-authors, or at least accomplices of crimes under international law,” Alexis Deswaef, vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), told The National.
“They can be prosecuted and judged even if they are physically absent. It's important that the judiciary does its work because impunity breeds further impunity.”
In Mr Tirawi's investigation, the sergeant, speaking Hebrew, identifies killings carried out by members of his team in a video shown to him by an unnamed interviewer. The context of the interview, in which the sergeant openly discusses his unit's operations, remains unclear.
The sergeant claims all of the snipers' victims were “terrorists”. According to translated captions, he says: “They want to exploit our humaneness. They think, 'Oh, I don’t think they’ll shoot us because we’re in civilian clothes, because we don’t lift up our weapons' and all that, but they were wrong and that’s what snipers are for.”
The FIDH filed the lawsuit along with its Palestinian and French member organisations – Al-Haq, Al Mezan, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and France's Human Rights League (LDH) – as well as the Association France Palestine Solidarite (AFPS).
It includes testimonies compiled by Al Mezan of Gazans who describe being shot by snipers as they attempted to retrieve the bodies of their relatives. One witness, whose 17-year-old daughter was killed, said she was shot in the head as she was fetching water. Another described the death of his three sons at the hands of Israeli snipers.
“The convergence of witness accounts and the visual documentation presented by Tirawi strongly points to the involvement of the same snipers in a co-ordinated campaign of extrajudicial killings across various locations in Gaza,” said Issam Younes, general director of Al Mezan.
Emmanuel Daoud, lawyer for LDH and AFPS, said France "must ensure that these crimes do not go unpunished and guarantee the prosecution of those responsible, especially when they are its own nationals". The Israeli army is believed to include 4,000 French citizens.
The lawsuit comes six months after the FIDH and other NGOs filed a lawsuit at the crimes against humanity division of the Paris judicial court against another French-Israeli soldier, Yoel O, who published a video in which he appears to insult Palestinian detainees presenting signs of torture.
A first lawsuit filed by the same human rights groups in April last year was dismissed by the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor's Office, which mentioned an “insufficiently characterised offence”.
Investigations were also launched last year into members of the “Ghost Unit” in Belgium and South Africa. Its members include three US citizens, two French, one Belgian, one South African, one Italian and other Israelis with unknown dual nationalities, Mr Tirawi said.
