A recent incident involving an IDF soldier in Brazil highlights how modern warfare’s greatest threats often come not from weapons, but from smartphones. A October 7 terror survivor became a target not on the battlefield, but through social media posts. He was forced to flee Brazil after Hezbollah operatives triggered a war crimes investigation against him.

The unnamed soldier was a survivor of the Hamas attack on the Nova festival in 2023, part of the terror organization’s massive onslaught on the south in which terrorists killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war in Gaza.

More than 360 of the victims were murdered at the music festival.

The soldier survived the attack by running for many kilometers until he reached safety, narrowly dodging Hamas gunfire multiple times on the way.

He is now being investigated in Brazil under suspicion that he was involved “in the destruction of a residential building in the Gaza Strip while using explosives outside of combat” in November, the Brazilian Metrópoles news outlet reported.

Where’s Golda Meir when you need her? In 1972, she understood that military discipline meant total discipline – not just in combat, but in every aspect of operations. Today, that principle faces its greatest test in an arena she never had to consider: social media.

On the flip side consider also the modern history of investigations, those who hunted for social presence in order to bring justice. The Wiesenthal Center’s methodology represented truth: meticulously documenting specific war crimes, gathering concrete evidence of atrocities, and pursuing the actual perpetrators who ordered mass murder. They worked to hold accountable those who had turned peaceful villages into killing fields, while their neighbors pretended not to notice and in many cases this detailed work is far from over.

Just ask how so many Austrian towns to this day have hidden mass graves right nearby the nicest homes.

Today’s social media surveillance keyboard warriors are perverting that hard-fought noble mission into hasty and sloppy political warfare with dubious ethical foundations.

The Belgium-based Hind Rajab Foundation, formed in September 2023, is a perfect example. Led by Dyab Abou Jahjah, he openly boasts of his Hezbollah training and has celebrated the October 7 slaughter of civilians as “resistance.” A Hezbollah-trained operative leading a “human rights” organization? That tells you everything about their mission. Also their secretary, Kareim Hassoun, praised the mass murder of festival-goers as how Palestinians should define “returning home.” This genocidal mentality is clearly no Wiesenthal Center pursuing real justice – it’s allegedly a political front operation for extemists linked to terror groups who are weaponizing international legal systems against soldiers.

What then? In professional military forces there’s typically zero tolerance for social media use during deployment: No smartphones, no sensor sharing, no posts, no digital footprint. This isn’t arbitrary – it’s a critical security measure that protects both operational security and personnel safety.

A 1981 battle in the Seychelles offers an ironic historical lesson about erasing military traces. After their failed coup, white nationalist mercenaries backed by South Africa and tacitly supported by Reagan’s administration were officially “sentenced to death.” In reality, this theatrical sentencing was just leverage – millions in US taxpayer funds were then used to make the whole incident disappear. The mercenaries ended up lounging poolside, their operation’s failures buried under money and political dealmaking.

The parallel to today’s social media reality is stark. In 1981, Ronald Reagan could spend millions to make some of his embarrassing military incidents vanish. Today, no amount of money probably can erase a soldier’s digital footprint once it’s been captured by groups like the Hind Rajab Foundation. Their sprawling surveillance operation doesn’t need complex international backing – they just need to look at social media posts that never get truly deleted.

The Hind Rajab Foundation’s surveillance methodology is straightforward: As a branch of the March 30 Movement that campaigns for “genocide recognition” (while their leadership celebrates actual mass murder of civilians) they systematically monitor social media to capture content posted by IDF personnel inside and out of operations.

In November 2024 alone, they demanded the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for 1,000 IDF soldiers based on 8,000 pieces of “evidence” – mostly social media posts harvested from soldiers they scraped online. They’ve targeted IDF personnel on vacation in Brazil, the Netherlands, and the UAE, transforming any and all social presence of any soldier anywhere doing anything into expensive legal jeopardy.

The IDF’s response to the Brazil incident is hard to believe, and perhaps an indicator of more unaccebtable Netanyahu hubris about soldiers’ lives. Warning about social media posts after the fact, while necessary, is reactive not preventive. What’s needed is a fundamental shift in training and culture to prevent unnecessary harm.

Every post, every photo, every location check-in becomes a potential liability to Iranian networks of terror groups. It’s not just about operational security anymore – it’s about ensuring soldiers can safely travel during and after active duty without complex legal entanglements related to their service.

And everyone in the world should be watching. This isn’t just an Israeli issue, it’s a lesson for all modern armed forces facing extremist keyboards. In an age where digital footprints can be weaponized, operational security must evolve beyond traditional physical and communications security to encompass comprehensive digital hygiene. Can every soldier take their weapon completely apart with zero visibility and reassemble it ready to use safely… if it’s a smartphone?

The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s statement about “anti-Israeli elements” exploiting social media posts, while accurate, misses the larger point. The solution isn’t just to warn soldiers about potential enemy exploitation of any online presence and posts. It’s to establish and enforce a zero-tolerance policy for social media use during any active operations.

An organization led by someone who celebrated the October 7 terror attacks as his view of “resistance” can now successfully trigger international investigations using soldiers’ own posts. So one of the best defenses is hopefully more obvious now, leaving minimal digital trail to exploit.

The security imperative is clear: soldiers need better operations discipline not to hide crimes, but to protect themselves from coordinated political warfare and terror campaigns masquerading as justice.

The line between Wiesenthal’s relentless pursuit of documented mass murderers and today’s shameless weaponization of social media against any random soldiers couldn’t be clearer. And even more fundamentally, soldiers need to be professional to help establish their case for honest professionalism. Military discipline is needed in any battlefield.