Israel rocked by scandal as high army lawyer is thrown into jail

JERUSALEM — Till final week, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was the Israeli military’s high lawyer. Now she is behind bars and on the heart of a scandal rocking the nation after a weird sequence of occasions that included her abrupt resignation, a short disappearance and a frantic search that led authorities to search out her on a Tel Aviv seashore.

The cleaning soap opera-worthy saga was touched off final week by Tomer-Yerushalmi’s explosive admission that she permitted the leak of a surveillance video on the heart of a politically divisive investigation into allegations of extreme abuse towards a Palestinian at a infamous Israeli army jail.

The video reveals a part of an assault by which Israeli troopers are accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee.

By leaking the video final yr, Tomer-Yerushalmi aimed to show the seriousness of the allegations her workplace was investigating. As an alternative, it triggered fierce criticism from Israel’s hard-line political leaders. After Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned beneath stress final week, her critics continued to heave private insults.

She left a cryptic observe for her household and deserted her automotive close to a seashore. That led to fears she had taken her personal life and prompted an intensive search that included using army drones.

She was discovered alive on the seashore Sunday night time, at which level extra vitriol towards her was unleashed.

“We can resume the lynch,” right-wing TV character Yinon Magal, an ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, posted on X with a winking-face emoji.

After it was revealed that certainly one of Tomer-Yerushalmi’s telephones had disappeared, right-wing politicians and commentators started to accuse her of staging a suicide try as a technique to destroy potential proof.

The extraordinary episode reveals two years of devastating struggle have executed little to heal a rustic that was deeply divided even earlier than Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault. It additionally makes Tomer-Yerushalmi the most recent in an extended line of high safety officers who’ve both left workplace or been pressured out, most of them to get replaced by individuals thought of loyal to Netanyahu and his hardline authorities.

Anger over leak distracts from extreme abuse at coronary heart of case

At a court docket listening to Monday, the decide mentioned Tomer-Yerushalmi’s detention can be prolonged till Wednesday on suspicion of committing fraud, breach of belief and obstruction of justice. Whereas the investigation into her actions continues, she is being held at a girls’s jail in central Israel.

Israeli media reported that former chief army prosecutor Col. Matan Solomesh was additionally arrested in reference to the leak investigation. The prime minister’s workplace has refused to touch upon Solomesh’s arrest.

The fury over the leaked video reveals the depth of polarization in Israel — and at the very least for the second, retains the media and the general public targeted on the leak and never the allegations of abuse.

The assault occurred on July 5, 2024, on the Sde Teiman army jail, based on the indictment towards the accused troopers. The AP has investigated allegations of inhumane remedy and abuse at Sde Teiman that predate these within the surveillance video.

The video, which has been aired by Israeli information, reveals troopers taking a detainee into an space they cordoned off with shields in an obvious try to cover their actions. The indictment mentioned the troopers assaulted the Palestinian prisoner and sodomized him with a knife, inflicting a number of accidents.

A medical staffer accustomed to the case who spoke on situation of anonymity out of concern for his security mentioned the detainee arrived at a civilian hospital in life-threatening situation with blunt trauma to the stomach and the chest and fractured ribs.

He mentioned the detainee underwent surgical procedure for a perforated rectum and was launched again to Sde Teiman days later. The staffer mentioned it was essentially the most excessive abuse case he was accustomed to from Sde Teiman.

When army police got here to Sde Teiman in July to detain the troopers suspected of abuse, they scuffled with protesters against the arrests. Later, a whole lot of violent protesters broke into the detention heart.

In her resignation letter, Tomer-Yerushalmi wrote that she had uncovered proof of the abuse to counter the concept the army was unfairly concentrating on its personal troopers. That concept was making a hazard to the army’s regulation enforcement, she mentioned, citing the break-in.

She wrote that the army had a “duty to investigate when there is reasonable suspicion of violence against a detainee.

“Sadly, this fundamental understanding — that there are actions which must not ever be taken even towards the vilest of detainees — now not convinces everybody,” she wrote.

The Palestinian detainee who was the subject of the alleged abuse in the video was released back to Gaza last month as part of an exchange between living hostages and Palestinian prisoners, according to documents from the military prosecutor’s office obtained by the AP.

The case is still pending before the military court.

A web of legal issues

Three separate legal issues must be sorted out as part of Israel’s investigation into what happened at Sde Teiman, said Yohanan Plesner, the president of the Jerusalem-based think tank Israel Democracy Institute.

The first relates to evidence that Israeli soldiers abused Palestinian detainees while they were in detention. The second is whether Israeli civilians, including members of parliament, tried to disrupt the investigation by breaking into the military base where the soldiers accused of the actions were being held. The third is whether Tomer-Yerushalmi allegedly committed a host of offenses, including fraud, to undermine the investigation into how the surveillance video was leaked to the media.

The extreme rhetoric over the previous few days is paying homage to what it was like in Israel instantly earlier than the Oct. 7 assault that launched the struggle in Gaza, Plesner mentioned. On the time, the general public was deeply divided over Netanyahu’s push to overtake the judiciary.

The priority for a couple of hours Sunday night time about Tomer-Yerushalmi’s destiny ought to function a “stop sign” to the Israeli public — and particularly to commentators who derided her personally, Plesner mentioned.

“It was very sad to see how the internal discourse can bring about such potentially tragic outcome on a personal level,” Plesner mentioned.

It felt particularly symbolic, he mentioned, that Tomer-Yerushalmi was in court docket whereas the Israeli authorities held its official memorial ceremony marking the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Many regard the assassination as Israel’s lowest level by way of divisions and incitement among the many Israeli public, and fear that the dramatic occasions of the weekend foreshadow Israel’s return to an analogous interval of inner strife.

“It was very sad to see how the internal discourse can bring about such potentially tragic outcome on a personal level,” Plesner mentioned. “There’s a way how to debate our differences in a democratic society.”