A French woman has filed a complaint against Israel over the regime’s genocide in Gaza after two of her grandchildren were killed in Israeli strikes on the besieged Palestinian territory.
Jacqueline Rivault filed the complaint with the crimes-against-humanity section of the Court of Paris, her lawyer Arie Alimi said Friday.
The complaint stated that “two F16 missiles fired by the Israeli army” killed two children of Rivault’s daughter who were also French nationals in northern Gaza on October 24, 2023.
According to the 48-page document, Janna, six, and Abderrahim Abudaher, nine, and their family had sought refuge in another home “between Faluja and Beit Lahia” after leaving their own two days earlier due to intensified Israeli strikes.
One missile entered “through the roof and the second directly into the room where the family was,” the complaint included.
Abderrahim lost his life immediately, while his sister Janna died shortly after being taken to hospital.
The complaint accuses Israel of genocide as the airstrike was part of a larger Israeli project to “eliminate the Palestinian population and submit it to living conditions of a nature to entail the destruction of their group.”
Rivault hopes the French judiciary will decide it has jurisdiction to designate a magistrate to investigate the complaint, given the nationality of her grand children.
The complaint is formally filed against unnamed parties, but reports said it explicitly targets Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli cabinet and the military.
In a separate case, French anti-terror prosecutors have opened a probe into “complicity in genocide” and “incitement to genocide” over the involvement of French-Israeli nationals in Israel’s genocidal campaign, a source close to the case said Friday.
The probe comes after the Jewish French Union for Peace (UFJP) and a French-Palestinian victim filed a legal complaint in November 2024, leveling accusations of “organizing, participating in and calling for the participation in concrete activities to block humanitarian aid” for Gaza, “including physically preventing the passage of trucks at border checkpoints controlled by the Israeli army.”
Israel launched the campaign of genocide in Gaza on October 7, 2023. It has killed at least 54,677 Palestinians there so far, according to the health ministry of Gaza.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued arrest warrants for prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former minister of military affairs Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024, the day the Prosecution filed the applications for warrants of arrest.”
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its deadly war on the besieged Palestinian territory.
