The rape and torture of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman detention center on 5 July 2024 by a group of Israeli reservists came to light because of two individuals: an Israeli top IDF prosecutor and an Israeli journalist. The prosecutor who leaked the video of the attrocity is being charged with a high crime and is awaiting trial in prison. The journalist who published the leaked video lives in fear of his life and is being called a criminal. In a perversion of justice, Israel‘s judiciary and government are engulfed in a witch hunt against these two whistleblowers, while ignoring the prosecution of the five perpetrators who raped the Palestinian.
Diana Mautner Markhof
6 November 2025
In 2021 Military Advocate General, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, was showered with praise as the IDF’s next top lawyer. She was only the second female major general in the history of the IDF. Back then she was hailed as a „trailblazer“ by Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
How times have changed: On 2 November 2025, Prime Minister Benjamin Nentanyahu blamed Tomer-Yeushalmi „perhaps [for] the most severe public relations attack the State of Israel has experienced since its establishment,” going on to state that the incident at the Sde Teiman detention center in the Negev “caused immense damage to the image of the State of Israel and the [Israel Defense Forces].” He accused the top lawyer of “treason” and participating in “blood libel” against the five alleged rapists.
Lets be clear here. According to Netanyahu, it is not the alleged gang rape and severe torture of a Palestinian detainee by a group of IDF soldiers at Sde Teiman that was the worst public relations disaster in Israel’s history, but the fact that the truth was revealed by a very brave prosecutor, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi.
Political insiders have noted that Netanyahu and his right-wing government and supporters are instrumentalizing this witch hunt against Tomer-Yerushalmi to rekindle their “fight” to reform Israel’s judiciary and curb the power of what they perceive as Israel’s deep state. Ori Goldberg, a political analyst told Al Jazeera: “Rape doesn’t matter, …., what matters is the woman who leaked the tape and what they want to call the deep state.” Adding that, “For Netanyahu and others, this is evidence that the deep state has gotten too big for its britches“. Their goal is to rekindle the highly contencious judicial reform or „judicial coup“, strengthen the executive branch and remove any civilian oversight of government. This reform would protect Netanyahu from further prosecution. His trial for corruption has been put on pause since his war on Gaza.
Next to Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the journalist Guy Peleg who published the leaked video also deserves praise. Instead, Israel’s right-wing government has labelled him a criminal for publishing the fact that proved the investigation into the IDF soldiers’ abuse of a Palestinian detainee was real. Rogel Alpher’s opinion piece on 5 November 2025 in Haaretz hit the nail on the head: „In a democracy, that would be journalism. In today’s Israel, it’s treated as a crime“.
Far-right Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, the same minister who called for the dropping of an atomic bomb on Gaza after October 7, is now calling for Peleg to be imprisoned. Eliyahu also broke into an army base in July 2024 to protest the investigations of the IDF reservists.
Peleg now lives under a 24/7 security detail because of the threats against his life.
But not only is the truth under fire in today’s Israel, but also the free press. Netanyahu’s right-wing government labels Israel’s free press as collaborators with Hamas, thus making them also responsible for the massacre of October 7.
Tomer-Yerushalmi is now treated like a criminal and is being charged with fraud and breach of trust, abuse of office, obstruction of justice and disclosure of official information by a public servant. She has admitted to leaking the video and announced her resignation on Friday, 31 October 2025. She was arrested on 2 November 2025.
The IDF has announced that Israeli police launched a criminal investigation into the leak of the abuse video involving a Gazan detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility in 2024 and also into “the involvement of officials in the Military Advocate General’s Office” to cover up the leak.
The video was first exposed by Guy Peleg in August 2024 on Israel’s Channel 12 News. The reservists were originally charged in February 2025 with aggravated abuse and serious injury to the detainee. In a bid to protect the identity of the alleged rapists, the court issued a gag order on the names of the defendants. Ironically, the perpetrators are not being held in detention, unlike Tomer-Yerushalmi, who awaits trial in prison.
It is sad and ironic that in Netanyahu’s Israel the spotlight is on the leaker and not on the original crime and the alleged criminals.
Israel’s torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees is no secret and has been in the news for many years. Since Israel’s war on Gaza, the abuse of detainees has increased, with some Israeli politicians defending the practice. According to the UN, at least 75 Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli jails since 7 October 2023. The bodies of these detainees have not all been released back to their families.
Palestinians who died while being detained by Israel and whose bodies did get returned show signs of torture. Many have marks on their bodies or blindfolds and handcuffs still on some of them. Some of the bodies are even missing limbs or teeth. Others have severe burn marks, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza.
The gang rape of the Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman on 5 July 2024 took place while he was “blindfolded, and cuffed at the hands and ankles.” The surveillance camera footage indicated that soldiers committed illicit acts. Although the acts themselves were not caught on camera, because the soldiers were hiding their horrible acts by holding up shields, the indictment against the IDF reservists states they were charged with “acting against the detainee with severe violence, including stabbing the detainee’s bottom with a sharp object, which had penetrated near the detainee’s rectum”, adding “the acts of violence have caused severe physical injury to the detainee, including cracked ribs, a punctured lung and an inner rectal tear”.
“For 15 minutes, the accused kicked the detainee, stomped on him, stood on his body, hit him and pushed him all over his body, including with clubs, dragged his body along the ground, and used a taser gun on him, including on his head,” the indictment on the case read.
The Palestinian victim needed emergency surgery after the incident and has recently been returned to Gaza. It is unlikely that he will ever be given the chance to testify in the proceedings against the five assailants, whose charge has now been “downgraded” to “severely abusing” the detainee.
The plight of this Palestinian detainee was not an isolated case. An October 2024 UN report stated that “detainees said they were held in cage-like facilities, stripped naked for prolonged periods, wearing only diapers. Their testimonies told of prolonged blindfolding, deprivation of food, sleep and water, and being subjected to electric shocks and being burnt with cigarettes”.
These severe human rights abuses cannot be justified under any circumstances. Protecting the perpetrators and prosecuting those who leak the video is a total perversion of justice. While Israeli society is engulfed in a war of words in the court of law and public opinion against Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, its judicial system has forgotten the actual crime of rape caught on camera. In Israeli media the word rape does not appear anywhere. No press freedom, no truth, no justice. Israel has again tried to “kill the messenger”.
