News Desk
The resignation and subsequent arrest of Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, Israel’s former top military lawyer, has thrown the country into turmoil. Her admission that she leaked surveillance footage from the Sde Teiman military prison was meant to underscore the severity of the allegations. Instead, it unleashed a political firestorm.
The video, according to court filings, depicts Israeli soldiers dragging a Palestinian detainee behind makeshift shields before assaulting him. The indictment states that the soldiers sodomized the prisoner with a knife, leaving him with life-threatening injuries, including fractured ribs and a perforated rectum. A hospital staffer described it as the most extreme case of abuse he had seen from the prison.
Yet the outrage in Israel has not centered on the brutality of the act. Instead, it has focused on the leak itself—on the breach of loyalty, not the breach of humanity.
When military police attempted to arrest the accused soldiers, they were met with violent protests. Hundreds of demonstrators stormed the detention center in solidarity with the perpetrators. Politicians and media figures on the right framed the soldiers as patriots unfairly targeted by their own army.
This inversion—where the abusers are lionized and the abused erased—lays bare the inhuman logic of occupation, where Palestinian suffering is minimized, and accountability is treated as betrayal.
The Sde Teiman case is not an aberration. Human rights groups and journalists have long documented allegations of torture, humiliation, and sexual violence against Palestinians in Israeli custody. What makes this case different is that it was caught on camera—and even then, the system’s instinct was to shield the perpetrators.
Tomer-Yerushalmi’s resignation letter warned that the military’s law enforcement was collapsing under political pressure. She wrote that the “basic understanding—that there are actions which must never be taken even against the vilest of detainees—no longer convinces everyone.” Her words underscore a chilling reality: the erosion of moral red lines in a society hardened by endless human rights’ abuses and occupation.
The scandal has become a mirror reflecting Israel’s internal fractures. But for Palestinians, it is another reminder that their bodies remain battlegrounds for domination, their pain secondary to Israel’s political theater.
The international community may see this as a shocking episode. For Palestinians, it is part of a long continuum of abuse, where soldiers are celebrated for acts that should shame any democracy.
In the end, the scandal is not just about one prison, one video, or one general. It is about a system that rewards cruelty, silences truth-tellers, and normalizes atrocities in the name of security.
