A Palestinian reckoning in Poland

Amjad Agha stared at the ruins of his home for a long time. The cab driver who had brought him from the hospital dropped him off farther away. The street, too, had been destroyed. He walked barefoot over the shattered asphalt and debris; he had given his shoes to his wife, Alaa, whom he had pulled from the rubble a few hours earlier. For some reason, he couldn’t feel the shards of glass digging into his feet.

It was Saturday, October 14, 2023. Israel’s attacks on Gaza had begun only a week earlier, but he had already lost everything.

In the past two years, Israel has killed 231 of Agha’s family members. The bomb that destroyed his house killed his cousin, Khamis, and the rest of Khamis’s family, including nieces and nephews who once played with his children.

Today, Agha and his family live in Poland. He and a fellow Polish-Palestinian, Ahmed Elsaftawy, with the support of KAKTUS, a Polish-Palestinian Initiative for Justice, and the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), have filed a criminal complaint with the District Prosecutor’s Office in Wrocław, accusing senior Israeli officials of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.

“I am not demanding preferential treatment,” Elsaftawy, Agha’s co-plaintiff, said in his statement to the Prosecutor’s Office. “On the contrary, I am only demanding the right to truth, accountability, and the protection of fundamental humanitarian values, which should apply regardless of nationality, religion, or origin. I believe that Polish state institutions should treat this matter with due seriousness.”

The cost of a Palestinian life

Agha first arrived in Poland in 1987 on a scholarship to study abroad. He graduated from the Łódź University of Technology with a degree in food chemistry and management. He was naturalized as a Polish citizen after spending 18 years in the country before returning to Gaza in 2005 to support his mother following his father’s death. He and his immediate family — Alaa and their two children, Malik and Razan — are survivors of the genocide.

It was Saturday, October 14, 2023. Israel’s attacks on Gaza had begun only a week earlier, but Amjad had already lost everything.

The family barely escaped death. One night, Alaa insisted they all sleep in the hallway, as far from the windows as possible. Had it not been for a surge of shock and adrenaline that let Agha dig through brick and cement with his bare hands, his wife would have died under the rubble of their home. It was paramedics who saved one-year-old Razan when she stopped breathing on the way to the hospital.

Agha met Elsaftawy, a distinguished surgeon and Department Head of Plastic and Hand Surgery in Trzebnica, near Wrocław, at the panel discussion, “Reflections on Individual and Collective Trauma,” where Dr. Gabor Maté and Agha shared their input.

Elsaftawy, who has lived in Poland for over 30 years, trembles at the thought of his father — an aging, ailing man who survived the Nakba — living under Gaza’s unbearable, inhumane conditions. When a friend told him about Hala Consulting and Tourism Services, an Egyptian company with a monopoly on transfers through the Rafah Crossing, he traveled to Egypt in March 2024, after receiving no immediate support from Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

At Hala’s offices, he waited in a long queue of desperate Palestinians who, like him, were there to pay for their families’ evacuation — $5,000 for adults, $2,500 for children — all of them clutching a thick wad of dollars. The room, Elsaftawy recalls, had a constant whir-click-swish, the three-note symphony of the money-counting machines.

After 10 p.m., he was finally handed a form requesting passport copies and information about his father, stepmother, brother, his wife, and their children: four adults, three children. The amount due was $27,500.

The cash-counting machine detected an extra banknote. In the hallway, a Palestinian man stood with tears in his eyes: the machine had rejected one of his banknotes. Elsaftawy handed him the one just returned to him. He still carries the man’s ripped hundred-dollar bill to remember the price of a Palestinian life.

Hunger as a weapon

In their complaint, Agha and Elsaftawy, with support from KAKTUS and HRF, accuse Israeli leaders of various war crimes, including the deliberate use of starvation as a method of warfare.

Elsaftawy’s family fled Gaza one month after he visited Hala’s office; many others remained, forced to live without sufficient food, medical care, or security. Several died as a result, but his most painful loss was his sister’s death. Her name was Amal. She died of malnutrition.

Agha’s children also suffered thirst and malnutrition before they were evacuated. Their bodies were weak from insufficient calories and nutrients, which stunted their growth and left them chronically ill from the cold and rain they were exposed to in their tents. At the UNRWA clinic, where their parents went whenever they could find medicine for diarrhoea, fevers, and coughs, Razan was diagnosed with acute malnutrition, and Malik with anaemia.

International humanitarian law firmly prohibits the deliberate deprivation of essentials for survival and the obstruction of humanitarian aid deliveries — in treaty law, like the Fourth Geneva Convention ratified by Israel in 1951, and, decisively, in customary international law, which Israel is bound to regardless of which treaties it has ratified.

The conditions in Gaza are by no means accidental: whether food, medicine, anesthetics, and other essentials reach the Strip — and in what quantities — depends entirely on Israeli authorities. The complainants thus argue that blocking aid trucks at the Gaza crossing deliberately caused a humanitarian crisis and led to famine.

Malik and Razan are safely in Poland after evacuating Gaza. Photo courtesy of Amjad and Alaa Agha.

Anna Błaszczak-Banasiak, director of Amnesty International in Poland, explained to Raseef22 that the use of starvation as a method of warfare may constitute not only a war crime, but genocide itself.

“The acts listed in the Genocide Convention from 1948 are not only the killing of members of a group or causing them serious bodily or mental harm, but also deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” Błaszczak-Banasiak said. “That act is particularly characteristic of the genocide in the Gaza Strip.”

Another allegation concerns Israel’s forced evacuation orders — Agha and his family were told to leave Khan Younis a few days after their home was destroyed — which appear to protect civilians but, as Błaszczak-Banasiak explains, only produce more physical destruction.

“When the vast majority of the territory is subject to forced displacement, and the entire population has been crowded into a de facto ghetto from which it is almost impossible to flee, then it cannot be explained that these actions are aimed at protecting their life or health; it is precisely the opposite,” Błaszczak-Banasiak said. “We cannot assume Israeli officials are unaware of how their actions affect Palestinians.”

Both Agha and Elsaftawy recognize that, tragic as their stories are, they are by no means unique among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed, harmed, or otherwise affected by Israel’s genocide.

As of July 8, at least 73,110 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 173,599 injured, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

The conditions in Gaza are by no means accidental: whether food, medicine, anesthetics, and other essentials reach the Strip — and in what quantities — depends entirely on Israeli authorities.

Although a ceasefire agreement took effect on October 10 of last year, Israeli attacks on Gaza have not stopped. Humanitarian aid access remains heavily restricted, with repeated warnings about shortages of food, medicine, shelter, and fuel.

Building the foundations for criminal liability

The complaint alleges, among others, violations of Articles 118, 118a, 122, and 172 of the Polish Penal Code — provisions of Polish domestic law criminalizing genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes against persons, and war crimes against property, which implement similar provisions of international law.

Conducting an investigation would require assessing the individual responsibility of specific individuals holding the highest state positions, “in accordance with the principle that responsibility for international crimes is personal in nature and not limited solely to the direct perpetrators of the acts,” according to Dr. Małgorzata Andrzejczak-Świątek, of the Institute of Legal Sciences at the Police Academy in Szczytno. “It is not enough to prove that Israel is committing genocide; it is necessary to determine the individual responsibility of specific individuals.”

The complaint’s alleged perpetrators include:

Yoav Gallant and Israel Katz, former and current Israeli Ministers of DefenseEli Cohen, current Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and WaterHerzi Halevi and Eyal Zamir, former and current Chiefs of the General Staff of the Israel Defense ForcesDavid Saar Salama, Commander of the Israeli NavyGhassan Alian and Yoram Halevi, former and current heads of the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)

In cases involving international crimes, law enforcement agencies often spend years investigating before there’s a realistic chance to arrest or question suspects, Dr. Andrzejczak-Świątek notes in her conversation with Raseef22. At the same time, the length of proceedings often reinforces perpetrators’ sense of impunity while weakening victims and their protection.

Dr. Andrzejczak-Świątek researches the protection of war crimes victims. She believes such proceedings often carry weight beyond their strictly domestic dimension, helping build the foundations of criminal liability that can be enforced both in national courts and within international justice mechanisms.

“Regardless of how the case proceeds, the complaint may prove to be an important contribution to the debate on the effectiveness of national mechanisms for prosecuting genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, and on Poland’s role in upholding the standards of international criminal law,” Dr. Andrzejczak-Świątek added. “In practice, the biggest obstacles in such cases concern immunities, jurisdictional issues, and the enforceability of procedural acts, rather than the mere possibility of registering a case and conducting evidentiary proceedings,” she explained.

Photo from the day Agha and Elsaftawy filed their complaint. Left to right: Nina Ptak (KAKTUS), Alaa, Amjad, Ahmed

Last January, the Polish-Palestinian Initiative for Justice KAKTUS supported a similar complaint in which three Polish citizens accused Israeli officials of international crimes committed against them and their families in the Gaza Strip. In that case, Elsaftawy was also among the complainants, alongside Dr. Waleed Abumoammar and another genocide survivor who prefers to remain anonymous.

Among the alleged perpetrators were Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Kisch, Israel’s former Minister of Education and a pilot who served in the IDF’s Air Force in 2014, when Dr. Abumoammar’s mother was killed. Although the District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw acknowledged their harm, it declined to open an investigation, citing the immunity of the alleged perpetrators.

Was that decision correct? According to REDRESS, an organization acting as amicus curiae — meaning it is not a party to the case but is permitted to offer the court information, expertise, or a legal perspective that may help it decide the matter — the answer is no. The organization argues that officials’ immunities should not limit the rights of victims of international crimes, especially when victims have no access to alternative remedies.

“It is not enough to prove that Israel is committing genocide; it is necessary to determine the individual responsibility of specific individuals.”

In May 2025, the victims filed an appeal against the decision to refuse to open an investigation, arguing that the refusal violates citizens’ constitutional right to a fair trial. A year has since passed, with even more of the plaintiffs’ family members killed in Gaza, while some of the alleged perpetrators have visited Poland during that time — Kisch at least twice.

“Criminal proceedings create a formal space for documenting victims’ accounts, securing evidence, and officially investigating the circumstances of events that affected not only Polish citizens but also civilians in Gaza on a massive scale,” said Dr. Andrzejczak-Świątek. “The case could certainly have a symbolic dimension, as it could reaffirm the principle that war crimes or genocide should be subject to thorough legal assessment, and not remain solely a subject of political debate.”

At the end of May, HRF, in cooperation with KAKTUS, filed another notification report with Polish law enforcement, demanding the immediate arrest and prosecution of Jonathan Barkat, a former reservist of the Israeli 55th Parachute Brigade. The complaint alleges that Barkat bears criminal responsibility for the intentional destruction of the Indonesian Istiqlal Mosque in Khan Younis, Amjad’s city.

This time, neither immunity nor the practical possibility of arrest or interrogation stood in the way.

“Everyone has the right to a fair and public hearing, without undue delay, before a competent, independent, impartial, and autonomous court,” states Article 45 of the Polish Constitution.