Tag: 401st Armored Brigade

Original article by Aseel Saleh republished from peoples dispatch under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

The move followed a thorough criminal investigation conducted by various institutions, which provided compelling evidence of the complicity of the named personnel.

The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) filed a complaint on Tuesday, October 21, to the International Criminal Court (ICC), with the names of 24 Israeli soldiers and commanders, whom evidence suggests are complicit in murdering six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, six of her family members, and two Palestinian paramedics in January 2024.

The move came one day after Al Jazeera Arabic broadcast a documentary on Monday, October 20, revealing the identities of the Israeli personnel, who “directly participated in or facilitated” the brutal assault.

The Brussels-based non-profit organization, which was named after the victimized Palestinian child with the mission of addressing and challenging Israeli impunity, said that the new complaint builds on its first communication to the ICC that was filed on May 3, 2025.

Who are the Israeli personnel identified by the HRF?

The first communication was filed by the foundation, after it identified Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Benny Aharon as the Israeli officer who has been directly responsible for Hind Rajab’s crime.

Aharon is the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) that carried out the military operation, which targeted Hind’s family car in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighborhood.

The HRF said then that it took a whole year of investigation to identify the IOF personnel under Aharon’s command who were involved in the attack.

In its new complaint, the HRF named the following IOF commanders and soldiers besides Aharon:

• Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Ella, Commander of the 52nd Armored Battalion, which operates under the 401st Armored Brigade.
• Major Sean Glass, Commander of the Vampire Empire Company, which operates under the 52nd Armored Battalion.
• 22 identified tank crew members of the Vampire Empire Company.

HRF’s executive director, Dyab Abou Jahjah, explained to Al Jazeera that the organization has known that the 401st brigade was responsible for killing Hind Rajab, but it wanted to go deeper than that and identify the battalion, the company and even every single tank participating on the ground at the time of the crime.

Regarding the complicit IOF company, Abou Jahjah said: “The company has only an English name ‘Vampire Empire’, which also indicates that it is in some sense a multinational company, and indeed it is. This company played a heinous role in the genocide in Gaza. It participated in the assault on Al-Shifa Hospital and in committing the massacre there.”

Read More: The genocide will not end until the Palestinian political leaders are free

“There is a large number of dual-nationality soldiers in the company, and this truly opens up avenues for legal action at the countries’ level. At the level of the home countries of these criminals,” he noted.

How were these names identified?

According to Al-Jazeera’s documentary, these names were identified by tracking the social media accounts and profiles of various IOF personnel, who were boasting about their crimes in Gaza by posting related footage online for several months.

Publicly available sources and other privately leaked documents, were also used by Al Jazeera to identify the names of those found complicit in various IOF units during Israel’s genocidal aggression on the Gaza strip, focusing on Hind Rajab’s killing incident.

An investigation was conducted by Al Jazeera, London-based multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture, and the world’s first not-for-profit organization producing audio investigations, Earshot.

The three investigatory partners relied on evidence and analysis based on maps, satellite images, eye witnesses accounts, audio recordings, and phone calls obtained from the crime scene, which precisely revealed the source of the shooting.

“It was a site where there was not much visual evidence of the incident until after it had transpired. As with many of our cases, we use satellite imagery and this case was no exception. And we were, in this case, also able to use audio recordings that were captured by the Palestinian Red Crescent,” Nicholas Masterton from Forensic Architecture told Al Jazeera in the documentary.

“What was interesting about this case, was the way that those two things; the spatial mapping that came from the satellite imagery and the audio recordings, came together to give us an insight into what occurred on that day,” Masterton added.

Israel claimed that Hind Rajab, her family, and the paramedics were present in an area where an exchange of fire took place between the IOF and Palestinian resistance fighters.

However, a 28-second audio recording of Hind Rajab’s cousin screaming at the time of the incident, while rapid gunshot from a weapon that fires at high rate is heard, confirms that no exchange of fire took place then.

Satellite images also showed that only Israeli Merkava tanks were deployed in the area, when the crime was perpetrated.

Original article by Aseel Saleh republished from peoples dispatch under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.