On 29 January 2024 a family set out by car to leave Gaza City. They did not get out. Israeli forces opened fire on the vehicle and her relatives were killed. Five-year-old Hind Rajab was still alive, and she called emergency services.
The recordings of that call travelled around the world. “I’m so scared. Please come!” she said. A rescue team was sent to reach her. Israeli forces killed them too, and they killed the girl.
Afterwards someone counted the holes in the car: 335 of them. At first the Israeli authorities blamed a firefight with Palestinian fighters. Forensic Architecture, the research group that reconstructs violence from evidence, found no sign that anyone had fired back, and concluded that Israeli forces were the only ones in the area at the time. Israel opened its own probe. Palestinians have described it as a way to avoid accountability.
That was almost three years ago. Since then the girl’s name has gone onto a foundation, into court filings and into a long, slow argument about who answers for what happened on that road.
A post on Monday
The latest turn came on Monday, 19 October. As Al Jazeera’s Brian Osgood reported, US Representative Rashida Tlaib used a social media post to demand that her own government arrest Sean Glass, an Israeli soldier said to have commanded the unit believed responsible for the killing. She cited reports that he was in the United States and argued that Washington had a legal duty to investigate his role.
As a party to the Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions, our government is obligated to arrest and investigate him for these war crimes and acts of genocide.
The report she shared came from the Hind Rajab Foundation, which tracks Israeli soldiers suspected of war crimes in Gaza. On the same day the foundation sent an urgent request to the US Department of Justice, according to its own statement, asking for Glass to be investigated, arrested and prosecuted. The headline on the foundation’s posting places him in New York.
What the foundation alleges
According to the foundation, Glass commanded a company that went by the name “Vampire Empire”, part of the 52nd Armored Battalion of the 401st Armored Brigade. It links the company to the deaths of Hind, her relatives and the medics who tried to reach them. The foundation says its investigation puts Glass and his troops close to Hind’s car at the time of the killing, and that he “most likely gave the order to open fire.” Now, it says, he “walks free in the United States.”
The request does not rely only on international treaties. It invokes two American laws: the War Crimes Act, 18 U.S.C. §2441, and the genocide statute, 18 U.S.C. §1091. The charges it lists include willful killing, torture and inhuman treatment, unlawful transfer, and extensive and wanton destruction of property. The foundation also ties Glass to attacks on Al-Shifa Hospital, the destruction of the UNRWA headquarters, the levelling of whole neighbourhoods and the destruction of the Rafah Crossing. Middle East Eye also carried the appeal.
All of this is an accusation, made by an advocacy group and taken up by a member of Congress. No court has ruled on it. No US response to Tlaib’s demand or to the foundation’s request has been reported.
The law on the shelf
The two statutes the foundation cites were passed by Congress. They give American prosecutors the power to pursue war crimes and genocide, and they sit in the US Code like tools hung on a wall, ready for use. Whether anyone takes them down depends on prosecutors and their political masters, not on the person asking.
Washington’s record points one way. The United States continues to give Israel diplomatic, military and economic support, and it has denounced the International Criminal Court for seeking arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Days ago its ambassador, Mike Huckabee, urged Israel to prosecute the attackers of an American journalist. That shows the government can ask for accountability when it wants to. What it has not yet shown is any willingness to look at a request that comes back the other way.
A reflection, not a finding: states usually write laws against atrocity with other countries’ soldiers in mind. The test comes when the accused is a friend, standing on the state’s own soil.
The numbers around her
Hind Rajab was one child among many. According to Al Jazeera, at least 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza, at least 21,000 of them children. UN experts and rights groups have called the assault a genocide. Most of those dead will never have their names in a filing, a foundation or a congresswoman’s post. Hind’s did, because she was on the phone while it happened and the recording survived.
The request now sits with the Justice Department in Washington, filed under a five-year-old’s name. It asks a question the department has not yet answered in public: whether the man the foundation accuses will be questioned in the country where he is reported to be staying.