Ex-IDF legal chief arrested over video leak allegedly showing abuse of Gaza detainee

Israeli authorities on Monday detained the military’s former top lawyer after she was accused of leaking footage allegedly showing Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting a detainee from the Gaza Strip at a detention centre that became notorious for abuse.

The lawyer, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, resigned as military advocate general Friday amid a growing storm in Israel over the footage - focused less on the abuse it depicted but rather on Ms Tomer-Yerushalmi‘s alleged deceptions and what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday called the “enormous reputational damage to the State of Israel” after the leak to an Israeli news channel last year.

Ms Tomer-Yerushalmi was detained on charges that included obstruction of justice, fraud and abuse of office, according to a judge’s ruling that extended her detention through Wednesday.

In a statement announcing her resignation, Ms Tomer-Yerushalmi admitted releasing the footage, saying that it was done “in an attempt to counter false propaganda against law enforcement authorities in the army,” while defending her decision to investigate the abuse.

“Unfortunately, this basic understanding - that there are acts that must not be committed, even against the most despicable of detainees - no longer convinces everyone,” she wrote.

The footage, which was first broadcast by Israel’s Channel 12, starkly depicted an episode of abuse in Israel’s Sde Teiman military detention centre, a desert encampment where Palestinian detainees were confined during the war.

The video reinforced the growing alarm by human rights advocates at the conditions for thousands of Palestinians swept into Israeli detention centres or prisons, amid testimony shared with advocates and lawyers of beatings, rapes, starvation and deaths in custody.

In a portion of the footage, a group of soldiers wearing balaclavas led a blindfolded, bound detainee away from more than two dozen other detainees, all lying face down on the floor in what appears to be a hanger.

A separate portion shows the soldiers, including one holding a barking dog on a leash, holding shields to obstruct the view of the detainee they are surrounding, presumably from the camera.

The detainee, from Gaza, was severely ill when he arrived at a hospital and required surgery for a “rectal perforation,” according to a person who viewed the medical file and spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to share the information. The detainee also had signs of trauma to the chest and the abdomen, the person said.

As Israel’s right-wing establishment has tried to paint Ms Tomer-Yerushalmi as a traitor for impugning Israeli soldiers, in a warning to would-be whistleblowers, human rights advocates pointed out that she had failed to respond to other abuse allegations against the military, saying that her prosecution of the reservists was an exception, rather than the rule.

She faced criticism from far-right demonstrators and politicians shortly before she leaked the footage, in July 2024, when her office ordered the detention of nine reservists at Sde Teiman in connection with the “serious abuse” of a detainee.

“I’m calling on the chief military prosecutor, get your hands off the reservists,” Bezalel Smotrich, the Finance Minister, wrote on X, as demonstrators stormed the detention centre.

The release of the footage sparked global outrage. Five reservists were eventually indicted on charges of causing severe injury and abuse under aggravating circumstances.

The indictment found they had acted “against the detainee with severe violence, including stabbing the detainee’s bottom with a sharp object, which had penetrated near the detainee’s rectum.”

They were not, however, charged with rape. Their lawyers have denied the accusations.

On Wednesday, Israel’s attorney general announced an investigation into the leaked footage, following “newly received information.” Israel Katz, Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing defense minister, seizing on the inquiry, accusing Ms Tomer-Yerushalmi of “blood libel” against Israeli soldiers while vowing to strip her of her rank.

At a news conference Sunday, a lawyer for the reservists, Adi Keidar, called for their trial to be cancelled because of what he called a “flawed, biased and completely fabricated legal process.” Four of the reservists, wearing masks, appeared with him.

In another bizarre twist, Ms Tomer-Yerushalmi disappeared for several hours Sunday but was later found alive and well, Israeli authorities reported.

Amos Harel, a left-wing columnist writing in Haaretz on Monday, said Mr Netanyahu’s “attempt to frame the leak itself as a grave and false blow to Israel’s international standing is unconvincing.”

“When it comes to Israel’s foreign relations, the problem lies in the actions themselves - abuse in detention facilities, war crimes in Gaza, and outrageous statements by government ministers - not in the prosecution’s leaks,” he wrote.

Lost, too, in the storm over the leak was the reality that Ms Tomer-Yerushalmi had largely refused to act on warnings from human rights advocates about detainee and prisoner abuse during the war, said Naji Abbas, director of the Prisoners and Detainees Department for Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

“We believe the only reason why an investigation was opened” into the abuse of the detainee depicted in the footage “was because they hurt him really badly, and he needed to be hospitalised and moved from the detention facility,” Abbas said. There had been a “direct risk to his life,” he added.

Mr Abbas’s organisation had sent Ms Tomer-Yerushalmi’s office dozens of other complaints since the start of the war, he said - “testimony about people being tortured, deaths in custody, people dying in military camps.”

Her office responded that “these things are being investigated, but we don’t know any soldiers who were arrested,” he said.

“Systematic torture at Sde Teiman is a fact,” Breaking the Silence, an Israeli nonprofit that gathers testimony from soldiers who have served in the Palestinian territories, wrote on X last week, as the leak investigation was announced.

“But what’s truly intolerable, according to the IDF, is a leaked video letting the public know about it. Since October 7, Palestinians have been tortured and starved in the Israeli detention centres,” the group said, linking to testimony they had taken from a reservist they said had served at Sde Teiman.

“I woke up in Sde Teiman and simply saw how an Abu Ghraib-like thing was taking shape,” the reservist said.

“You see normal, pretty ordinary people, reaching a point where they abuse people for their own amusement, not even for an interrogation or anything.”

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