Why has the Israeli army’s top lawyer resigned after leaking rape evidence?

Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the head of the Israeli military, has admitted to leaking footage that shows a prisoner being gang raped by a prisoner at the Sde Temain prison facility in August of last year.

In the midst of a right-wing backlash following the arrest of several soldiers for the rape of a Palestinian prisoner, the video of the rape had originally been leaked to the press in early August.

Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned on Friday, blaming pressure from the right for her decision to release the video, asserting that she was responding to “false propaganda directed against the military law enforcement authorities.”

A blindfolded Palestinian prisoner is captured in the leaked footage by soldiers grabbing and escorting him before covering him with riot shields as they continue their rape.

The original indictment stated that the accused kicked the detainee, stomped on him, stood on his body, hit him repeatedly, dragged his body along the ground, and taser-fired him, including on his head, for 15 minutes.

The victim’s alleged injuries to the anal and lung areas, as well as broken ribs, were documented in medical records obtained by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Later, he needed surgery.

How did the soldiers fare?

In connection with the man’s rape, at least nine soldiers were detained. The release of all but five was quick.

The remaining soldiers were detained in February after the detainee was “severely abducted” but refused to rape him. The trial is raging.

A UN commission concluded that the decision to downgrade the indictments, despite the evidence, “will inevitably lead to a more lenient punishment” if the conviction is made after reviewing the change of indictment and other instances of Israel’s use of sexual and gender-based violence.

Why didn’t Israeli politicians demand accountability?

because they believed it to be inherently anti-patriotic to do so.

Several far-right politicians from Israel, including Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, gathered outside the Sde Teiman prison to protest the soldiers’ rape arrests.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s hard-right National Security Minister, addressed Tomer-Yerushalmi directly in July 2024, expressing the message, “The Military Advocate General, take your hands off the reservists” in Hebrew. he said, referring to the soldiers who are accused of rape.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a fellow far-right traveler, was also active on social media at the time, expressing his support for the alleged rapists as “heroes, not villains.”

Smotrich, who returned to social media during the uproar that followed the rape, instead urged an “immediate criminal investigation to find the leakers of the trending video, which was intended to harm the reservists and that caused enormous harm to Israel in the world, and exhaust the full severity of the law against them.”

What was Tomer-Yerushalmi’s resignation’s response among the critics?

The woman who provided the evidence for the alleged rape’s release received the same amount of vocal support as the accusation’s most vocal supporters.

Smotrich blasted her and a large portion of Israel’s judicial system of rank corruption and launched what he called an “anti-Semitic blood libel” against their military in a post-resignation on social media shortly after Tomer-Yerushalmi’s resignation.

Ben-Gvir wrote in response to the leak of the footage, “Everyone involved in the affair must be held accountable,” and he also made a similar point.

Both ministers are vocal supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ongoing efforts to stifle the judiciary and weaken its political oversight.

At Sde Teiman, have Palestinians been the victims of any other crimes?

According to the documents that came with each corpse, at least 135 of the mutilated bodies that Israel returned to Palestinian officials in Gaza last week as part of the ceasefire agreement, were located at Sde Teiman.

Some of the bodies had blindfolded, and some had their hands still tucked behind their backs. One wore a rope around its neck.

Detainees at Sde Teiman, including children, were frequently shackled, forced into stress positions, denied toilets and showers, and beaten, according to the same UN report that examined the reduced indictment against the soldiers.

Source: Aljazeera