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Group Seeks Chilean Prosecution of IDF Sniper Rom Kovtun Over Gaza Hospital Siege
The Hind Rajab Foundation filed the complaint, citing universal jurisdiction and Chile's law against genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Feb 16, 2026
A Brussels-based human rights group on Monday filed a criminal complaint in Chile seeking the prosecution of an Israel Defense Forces sniper accused of taking part in the deadly 2024 siege and destruction of Gaza's largest hospital.
The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF)—named after the young Palestinian girl who was killed in January 2024 along with six relatives and two rescue workers by IDF troops in Gaza City—said it filed the complaint in the 8th Guarantee Court in Santiago, the Chilean capital, requesting investigation and prosecution of Rom Kovtun, an Israeli Ukrainian sniper in the 424th “Shaked” Battalion of the Givati Brigade, under Chilean Law 20.357.
The law criminalizes genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes under the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), which in 2024 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged murder and forced starvation in Gaza.
HRF's complaint was formally submitted by Chilean lawyer Pablo Andrés Araya Zacarías, a partner at Silva-Riesco Abogados. The filing invokes universal jurisdiction—the legal principle empowering states to investigate and prosecute individuals for heinous crimes regardless of where they occurred—based on Kovtun's presence in Chile and Israel's refusal to prosecute him.
According to the complaint, Kovtun took part in the March-April 2024 siege and attack on al-Shifa Hospital in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City. The World Health Organization said at least 21 patients were killed during attacks on the facility, while Gaza officials claimed the toll was much higher.
Survivors and witnesses said IDF troops executed civilians during the raid on al-Shifa, including 13 children. The IDF denied the allegations. Doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers were also abducted and allegedly tortured by their IDF captors. Israeli claims that Hamas fighters were using al-Shifa as a command center were subsequently debunked as lies.
Hundreds of Palestinian bodies—some with bound limbs and signs of torture and execution—were found outside the hospital after IDF troops withdrew from the area, although it is not known if they were all killed there.
"The targeting and destruction of a functioning hospital during a military siege strike at the core of international humanitarian law,” HRF general director Dyab Abou Jahjah said on Monday. “When evidence indicates that a sniper participated in such an operation, domestic courts cannot look away. Universal jurisdiction exists to ensure that the most serious crimes do not go unexamined simply because they were committed abroad."
The @hindrajabfoundation.be has filed a complaint in 🇨🇱 #Chile, seeking investigation and prosecution of sniper Rom Kovtun for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The filing details his alleged participation in the siege and destruction of Al-Shifa Hospital.→ https://bit.ly/4tF1EJt
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— The Hind Rajab Foundation (@hindrajabfoundation.be) February 16, 2026 at 12:27 PM
HRF head of litigation Natacha Bracq said that "international humanitarian law grants special protection to hospitals, medical personnel, and the wounded."
"The encirclement and destruction of a functioning medical complex, combined with the deprivation of food, water, and medical care, are not collateral damage—they constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide," she added.
Israel is facing a genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has issued multiple provisional orders for Israel to avoid genocidal acts in Gaza. Critics say Israel has ignored the orders.
Chile embraced universal jurisdiction in the decades following the fall of the US-backed military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, whose 1998 arrest in London for crimes against humanity stemmed from an international warrant issued by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón based on universal jurisdiction.
HRF, which was founded in the Belgian capital in September 2024, has filed numerous legal complaints targeting alleged IDF war criminals. In one case, Israel helped an IDF soldier targeted by the group while vacationing in Brazil to flee the country in order to avoid arrest.
In October 2024, HRF filed what it called an "unprecedented" complaint at the ICC—which, like the ICJ, is located in The Hague, Netherlands—against 1,000 IDF troops accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Gaza. One year later, HRF filed another ICC complaint against 24 IDF members allegedly involved in the killing of Hind Rajab, her relatives, and two paramedics.
While there have been no known prosecutions of any individuals targeted by HRF, last May Peru formally opened a probe into "an Israeli national accused of participating in the genocide in Gaza."
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'What Climate Breakdown Looks Like': 50,000+ Flee Wildfires as Chile Declares 'State of Catastrophe'
"The first priority, as you know, in these emergencies is always to fight and extinguish the fire. But we cannot forget, at any time, that there are human tragedies here," said the country's president.
Jan 19, 2026
On the heels of another historically hot year for Earth, disasters tied to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency have yet again turned deadly, with wildfires in Chile's Ñuble and Biobío regions killing at least 18 people—a figure that Chilean President Gabriel Boric said he expects to rise.
The South American leader on Sunday declared a "state of catastrophe" in the two regions, where ongoing wildfires have also forced more than 50,000 people to evacuate. The Associated Press reported that during a Sunday press conference in Concepción, Boric estimated that "certainly more than a thousand" homes had already been impacted in just Biobío.
"The first priority, as you know, in these emergencies is always to fight and extinguish the fire. But we cannot forget, at any time, that there are human tragedies here, families who are suffering," the president said. "These are difficult times."
According to the BBC, "The bulk of the evacuations were carried out in the cities of Penco and Lirquen, just north of Concepción, which have a combined population of 60,000."
Some Penco residents told the AP that they were surprised by the fire overnight.
"Many people didn't evacuate. They stayed in their houses because they thought the fire would stop at the edge of the forest," 55-year-old John Guzmán told the outlet. "It was completely out of control. No one expected it."
Chile's National Forest Corporation (CONAF) said that as of late Monday morning, crews were fighting 26 fires across the regions.
As Reuters detailed:
Authorities say adverse conditions like strong winds and high temperatures helped wildfires spread and complicated firefighters' abilities to control the fires. Much of Chile was under extreme heat alerts, with temperatures expected to reach up to 38ºC (100ºF) from Santiago to Biobío on Sunday and Monday.
Both Chile and Argentina have experienced extreme temperatures and heatwaves since the beginning of the year, with devastating wildfires breaking out in Argentina's Patagonia earlier this month.
Scientists have warned and research continues to show that, as one Australian expert who led a relevant 2024 study put it to the Guardian, "the fingerprints of climate change are all over" the world's rise in extreme wildfires.
"We've long seen model projections of how fire weather is increasing with climate change," Calum Cunningham of Australia's University of Tasmania said when that study was released. "But now we're at the point where the wildfires themselves, the manifestation of climate change, are occurring in front of our eyes. This is the effect of what we're doing to the atmosphere, so action is urgent."
Sharing the Guardian's report on the current fires in Chile, British climate scientist Bill McGuire declared: "This is what climate breakdown looks like. But this is just the beginning..."
The most recent United Nations Climate Change Conference, where world leaders aim to coordinate a global response to the planetary crisis, was held in another South American nation that has faced devastating wildfires—and those intentionally set by various industries—in recent years: Brazil. COP30 concluded in November with a deal that doesn't even include the words "fossil fuels."
"This is an empty deal," Nikki Reisch of the Center for International Environmental Law said at the time. "COP30 provides a stark reminder that the answers to the climate crisis do not lie inside the climate talks—they lie with the people and movements leading the way toward a just, equitable, fossil-free future. The science is settled and the law is clear: We must keep fossil fuels in the ground and make polluters pay."
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Apologist for Pinochet Dictatorship Will Be Next President of Chile
José Antonio Kast has described the dictator who ended democracy for nearly two decades and presided over the persecution of tens of thousands of dissidents as someone who brought "order" to Chile.
Dec 15, 2025
José Antonio Kast, a far-right former lawmaker, won over 58% of the vote in Chile's runoff elections on Sunday over Jeannette Jara, the labor minister under outgoing left-wing President Gabriel Boric, to become the nation's next president.
The win came despite Kast's open admiration for General Augusto Pinochet, who ended civilian rule in Chile after taking power through a coup d'etat in 1973, overthrowing its democratically elected socialist leader in a US Central Intelligence Agency-backed plot and implementing a radical program of economic austerity.
Until he was ousted by a democratic referendum in 1990, Pinochet governed Chile as a military dictatorship rife with human rights abuses, resulting in his indictment by a Spanish court in 1996 for crimes against humanity. His regime assassinated or "disappeared" nearly 3,200 people, while tens of thousands were tortured and more forced into exile.
Human rights groups have accused Kast and his family—the patriarch of which was a member of the Nazi Party who fled to Chile in 1950—of collaboration with the Pinochet regime's detention of opponents. The president-elect's brother was a minister for Pinochet during the dictatorship.
Kast will be the first president of Chile since its return to democracy to have campaigned for and voted “Yes” in the 1988 plebiscite for the dictator to stay in power for another eight years despite his reign of terror.
But rather than distance himself from Pinochet's legacy, Kast has described himself as his spiritual successor.
In 2017, during his first of three presidential campaigns, Kast told a local newspaper that “if he were alive,” Pinochet “would vote for me.” Kast later described Pinochet as someone who brought “order” to Chile, comments that the Buenos Aires Times wrote in 2021, “railed many who are still scarred by this dark period in the country’s history.”
But Kast's nostalgia for that period of repression was not enough to hobble him this time around. At a time when the right is making gains across Latin America, Kast's policy agenda sits at the nexus point between the free market fundamentalism of Argentina's Javier Milei and the police state ambitions of El Salvador's Nayib Bukele.
He has pledged an economic program in the same vein as Pinochet's and, later, Milei's "shock therapy," proposing an unprecedented cut of $21 billion in public spending over his term, paired with a reduction in taxes on the wealthy.
Kast has pledged that these cuts would only affect "waste" and "political" spending, but not impact social programs that benefit Chileans. But economic analysts, including Javiera Toro, Chile's social development minister, have argued that a cut of that size would inevitably cut into the social safety net, including its popular state pension program and others related to health, housing, and education.
Kast successfully martialed fear of high crime (even though it actually fell under Boric's tenure) into outrage toward the nation's undocumented migrants—mainly from Venezuela—whom he has pledged to deport en masse. As in the US, where President Donald Trump is also spearheading a mass deportation operation, immigrants in Chile commit crimes at lower rates than those born in the country.
Last year, Kast visited the sprawling prison complex where Bukele has used emergency powers to detain tens of thousands of people as part of his sweeping war on gangs, often in punishing conditions where they've faced torture. Amnesty International described it as a "state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty." Kast said he'd like to implement a similar policy in Chile.
Kast immediately raised fears for the future of Chile's democracy in his victory speech, vowing to form an "emergency government" when he takes power in 2026. However, he will not command a majority in Chile's legislature, which may make the delivery of his agenda more challenging.
Jenny Pribble, professor of political science and global studies at the University of Richmond, told Al Jazeera: “It remains to be seen if Kast could or would pursue such an approach, but if Chile follows the Salvadoran model, it would constitute significant democratic backsliding.”
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