WARNING: This article contains details and footage that readers may find distressing
Israel’s former top military lawyer has been arrested in connection with a leaked video that shows the alleged abuse of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli soldiers.
Maj-Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was, until last week, the Military Advocate General of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Highlights
- Maj-Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, Israel's former top military lawyer, arrested over leak of video showing alleged abuse of Palestinian prisoners.
- Leaked footage from Sde Teiman prison revealed severe abuse, including sexual assault, causing global outrage in August 2024.
- Five soldiers charged with aggravated abuse and serious bodily harm; they deny charges.
On Friday, she took full responsibility for the leak of a video showing the alleged severe abuse of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military prison and resigned.
Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi leaked a video of alleged abuse at the Sde Teiman military prison
Image credits: Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images
The shocking footage was aired by Israel’s Channel 12 in August 2024 and triggered outrage across the globe.
After briefly disappearing and sparking concerns for her welfare, Tomer-Yerushalmi was traced at a beach north of Tel Aviv on Sunday and taken into police custody.
She has been arrested on multiple charges, including abuse of office and breach of trust, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling the leak “the most serious public relations attack” since the State of Israel was established.
The case has rocked Israel, but Tomer-Yerushalmi’s involvement and arrest have overshadowed the harrowing footage she helped to expose.
Image credits: IDF
In July 2024, an investigation was opened into soldiers who allegedly sexually assaulted and abused a detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman in the Negev desert.
The alleged incident on July 5 was captured on surveillance footage and showed rows of Palestinian detainees lying face down.
Reserve soldiers are seen to approach and drag one blindfolded man across the room, where he is then surrounded and covered by a wall of shields.
It is alleged that the soldiers, behind the cover of those shields, sodomized the man with a knife and beat him, causing severe injuries.
The man was taken to the hospital in a life-threatening condition with injuries to his rectum and upper body.
He was released to Gaza in October as part of a hostage-prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas.
After Channel 12 published the footage, military police attended the facility to question 11 reservists over the incident, but protests from the far-right ensued.
The man was taken to the hospital with severe injuries after the incident
Image credits: Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu via Getty Images
Three members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, alongside other protesters, broke into the facility to show their support for the reservists.
Five soldiers were charged with aggravated abuse and causing serious bodily harm, including using a “sharp object” to stab the prisoner. They deny the charges and have not been named.
In her resignation letter, Tomer-Yerushalmi said she approved the leak to “counter false propaganda against the army’s law enforcement authorities,” referencing attempts by some right-wing lawmakers to describe the abuse as fabricated.
Tomer-Yerushalmi, a longstanding target of the far right, described an “incitement campaign” against her that intensified amid the investigation of soldiers at Sde Teiman.
“This campaign continues to this very day and causes deep and serious harm to the IDF, to its image, and to the resilience of IDF soldiers and their commanders,” she wrote.
“There are things that cannot be done even against the worst of the detainees,”
Tomer-Yerushalmi added.
Tomer-Yerushalmi added.
“It is our duty to investigate whenever there is reasonable suspicion of acts of violence against a detainee.”
Tomer-Yerushalmi is facing charges of fraud, breach of trust, abuse of official power, obstruction of justice, and disclosure of information by a public official.
Defense Minister Israel Katz said in a statement that Tomer-Yerushalmi would not return to her position and an interim replacement would be appointed.
“I will ensure that justice is fully served against anyone who lent a hand to the blood libel against IDF soldiers in the Sde Teiman affair,” he wrote on X.
The allegations of abuse at Sde Teiman are just “the tip of the iceberg,” a report published by B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, said last year.
The report said that Israel had “instated a systemic policy of abusing and torturing thousands of Palestinians in its custody” and that detention facilities were the “definition of a torture camp.”
It found that Palestinian prisoners had been subjected to “harsh arbitrary violence” on a frequent basis, including sexual assault, humiliation, and degradation.
Human rights organizations have reported that Palestinians are abused in custody
Image credits: Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images
The report further described conditions such as deliberate starvation, a forced lack of hygiene, sleep deprivation, and restriction and punishment of religious worship.
Group and personal belongings were reportedly confiscated, and prisoners were said to have been denied adequate medical care.
Similarly, a report from the UN commission of inquiry in October last year said that thousands of Gazan detainees, including children, had been “subjected to widespread and systematic abuse.”
This included “physical and psychological violence, and sexual and gender-based violence amounting to the war crime and crime against humanity of torture and the war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence.”