Is Daniel G. still in Munich? He probably still has a registered address in that city. He was born and raised there, but at one time he enlisted in the Israeli army and became a sniper in Parachute Battalion 202. Today he is 25 years old.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) has now filed a criminal complaint against Mr. G. on suspicion of sniping Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Even without that report, the German prosecutor's office certainly knows about the case after a spectacular discovery by several media - the German public service ZDF, the weekly "Spiegel2", the London "Guardian" and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism.
This week, they published the results of a long investigation that identified Daniel G. as one of the snipers from Gaza, and his victims as unarmed civilians.
They brag about killing.
The story about it is cinematic. The reporters introduced themselves to a fellow soldier of Daniel G. as Israeli documentarians making a film about "Israeli heroes". In what was supposed to be a break from filming, they left the cameras on. And that's where Danijela G.'s comrade-in-arms practically presented evidence against himself and G.
He showed reporters footage from November 2023 from Gaza City. He said that they shot from the window at anything that moved, not knowing exactly who they were shooting at and for no particular reason other than that the Palestinians remained in the "combat zone". Daniel G. "eliminated eight terrorists," the friend boasted.
Some of the Israeli soldiers even earlier posted videos of the murder from the scene on YouTube. Several corpses are seen, one murder was recorded live. The video has been removed, but the journalists have it.
Although the footage was known earlier, now the journalists have managed to identify six sniper victims - of which four were killed and two were wounded. They are mostly men from a large family clan in the city of Gaza. That clan is even in conflict with Hamas.
At the time of some of the murders, unarmed men tried to approach the bodies of their relatives before they were shot.
The prosecution is on the move
For now, there is no information on what the German prosecutor's office has done or whether Daniel G. is still in Munich. If he was, he already had several days to possibly escape.
When the first videos of Daniel G. began to circulate on the networks - at that time without extensive data on who the victims were - the German prosecutor's office launched a preliminary investigation, which was quickly suspended last January. Mr. was never questioned.
Lawyers have no doubts that this is a war crime. "International humanitarian law requires that a distinction be made between military and civilian targets," says Christoph Zafferling, professor of criminal and international law. "You can't define a zone where anything that moves is automatically a military target."
Germany has a so-called universal principle when it comes to war crimes - it can prosecute anyone for any war crime committed anywhere.
So far, no Israelis have ended up in the dock, although at least six criminal charges have been filed against people who also hold German citizenship or are believed to have resided in Germany.
Israel's crimes in Gaza - where more than 60.000 people have been killed and around 90 percent of buildings destroyed - are a sensitive topic in Germany, given the Nazi history, the Holocaust and claims by German politicians that Israel's existence is Germany's "reason of state".
However, now in Germany too, the crimes of Israel are being talked about more openly, and even considering the previously unthinkable - is Israel committing genocide in Gaza?
But Friedrich Merz's government still blocks even the smallest sanctions against Israel within the EU. For now, the only consideration is to stop supplying Israel with those German weapons that can be used against civilians in Gaza.
