Israeli military's ex-top lawyer arrested over abuse video leak, row deepens
The scandal has sparked national outrage and accusations of a government cover-up amid ongoing tensions related to the Gaza conflict.
Israel military's chief lawyer was recently arrested after she confessed leaking a video of reservist soldiers abusing a Palestinian prisoner and lying to the country's supreme court about it.
Major general Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, assumed to have died by suicide, became the center of national attention on Sunday night. She was deemed missing after her car was found by a beach. However, Yifat was found alive several hours later and soon placed under arrest, Bloomberg reported.
The arrested soldiers were indicted for “inflicting serious injury under aggravating circumstances.”
Before the indictment, a television reporter aired a clip from the prison which captured some of the abuse. The soldiers’ defense lawyers, who hadn’t yet been handed the evidence, petitioned to the supreme court claiming breach of justice.
The court ordered an investigation, which was given to the office of Tomer-Yerushalmi, which later turned out to have leaked the tape. It told the high court it couldn’t determine the source.
Yerushalmi said that she authorised the leak to protect her colleagues who were accused by the far right of aiding Israel’s enemies. She added that her being caught allowed the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to shift attention away from the alleged abuse toward the leak and its claim that a “deep state” of public employees is undermining the nation.
Netanyahu on Sunday opened his weekly cabinet meeting by saying that the leak was “perhaps the most severe propaganda attack Israel has experienced since its founding.”
For him, “the crime wasn’t the abuse of a Palestinian detainee, but its exposure,” Haaretz newspaper said in an editorial on Monday. “What actually gives the country a bad reputation isn’t the video, but the prima facie war crimes.”
The affair combines two of the biggest issues of the past three years — the war in Gaza that started on October 7, 2023 and is now in a fragile ceasefire, and Netanyahu’s efforts to reduce the power of the legal system due the contention it’s politicized against the government.
This is happening as the government renews its effort — halted by the war — to reduce the authority of the Supreme Court, the attorney general and ministry legal advisers.
What had happened?
In July 2024, military police raided Sde Teiman, a desert facility where Palestinians captured in Gaza were being held, and arrested a number of Israeli reserve soldiers on suspicion of abusing a detainee. Teiman was the subject of Supreme Court challenges by human rights groups for prison conditions.
Infuriated by the arrests, an Israeli mob encouraged by far-right ministers and lawmakers, stormed Sde Teiman and another military base. The mob said that arresting Israeli soldiers during war amounted to an act of treason.
The issue resurfaced several weeks ago when a lawyer from that office underwent a routine polygraph test at the Shin Bet counterintelligence agency for a promotion. She admitted leaking the video at the advocate general’s request.
Following a probe, Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned. She said she vetted the “release of materials to the media” in “an attempt to counter false propaganda against military law enforcement officials.”
Questions upon Israel's treatment of detainees
Opposition and several human rights organizations claim that the issue is not on who gave the tape to the TV station but flashes light on Israel’s treatment of detainees.
According to the Bloomberg report, multiple newspapers and media organisations of Israel are angry at Tomer-Yerushalmi for having given the government an excuse to attack the legal system.
