On July 29, 2024, a Military Police team raided the Sde Teiman holding facility, where fighters from Hamas’ elite Nukhba unit—which spearheaded the Oct. 7 massacres—were being held. Their targets were not the terrorists.
Instead, they had arrived to arrest a group of IDF reservists serving there on guard duty. Their faces covered in masks, 40 Israeli Military Police officers disarmed and arrested 10 members of Force 100, which was in charge of security incidents at the jail.
The raid quickly got out of hand.
When other members of Force 100 learned of the arrest of their colleagues, they confronted the arresting officers—compelling them to use force. The whole strange affair was recorded on multiple cellphones and posted in real time on social media. By nightfall of the same day, the press in Israel and around the world would learn the cause of the raid: The arrested reservists were suspected—falsely, it would turn out—of raping a detained Palestinian terrorist.
Thus began a public scandal that would become one of the major stains on Israel’s reputation worldwide. Where the United Nations, foreign-funded information operations, and the biases of the international press may have all been to blame for weaponizing a series of medieval libels against Israel during the Gaza war—like Israeli snipers supposedly targeting babies or starving children or using the “cover” of war against Hamas to commit “genocide” or targeting Christians by “burning a church” in the West Bank (a grass fire outside an ancient archeological site) or “deliberately targeting” a Catholic church in Gaza whose outer courtyard wall was struck by an errant tank shell—the source for this fake atrocity story was different: The IDF itself.
Domestically, the prison raid and the ensuing rape scandal triggered a firestorm among both supporters and opponents of the Netanyahu government. After one reservist from Force 100 appealed to the public for help on social media, politicians, activists, and supporters rushed to the scene in real time, and a riot ensued outside the Sde Teiman holding facility. Led by right-wing Knesset members, a crowd broke into the military base and demanded the release of the arrested reservists—actions that were denounced by the left as proof of the government’s increasing lawlessness.
It did not take long before investigative journalist Ayala Hasson, an anchor on Kan 11, pointed out that the video itself comprised two parts, each with a different time stamp.
In recent weeks, however, the story of the “Sde Teiman rape” has undergone an abrupt reversal—leading first to the resignation of the IDF’s top prosecutor, Advocate General Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, and then to what seemed to many like her faked suicide attempt, in which she conveniently lost her cellphone at sea, and finally to her arrest. The phone was found in the water a week later, fully operational, its battery still halfway charged. The shock waves from this latest reversal are now threatening the power structure that Israel’s elites have built outside the reach of electoral politics, including the country’s all-powerful Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara and even the country’s Supreme Court.
All of which probably would have been avoided had the soldiers’ arrest been less showy. The men arrested at Sde Teiman were reservists on active duty. They could have been told to report for questioning without the drama, the masks, the confrontation, and the group arrest. Instead, they were publicly shamed for the world to see, even as the investigation was still in its initial stages.
There is much public sympathy for those who perform the thankless duty of guarding Hamas terrorists apprehended during the Gaza war, many of whom have Israeli blood on their hands. The staff at Sde Teiman, expanded hastily to accommodate the sudden influx of a large number of prisoners, is tasked with guarding the detainees and safeguarding their basic well-being and rights while also ensuring their own physical safety. Soldiers on guard duty suffer endless taunting and are in constant physical danger from inmates—most of whom are terrorists with military training.
There are three layers of security personnel at the site.
First are the regular military police wardens, who are armed with batons, tasers, and tear gas and are allowed only outside the cells and holding pens.
Then there are soldiers with firearms, who are tasked with guarding against break-ins and breakouts. They, too, are not allowed in the cells.
Last is Force 100, which is composed of soldiers who are specifically trained for emergency interventions such as dealing with inmates committing acts of violence or mass riots. Before smaller cells were constructed, the members of Force 100 would enter holding pens containing about 80 to 120 prisoners, in groups of 10, armed with batons, tasers, tear gas, and riot control shields, often accompanied by a leashed German shepherd guard dog. As one Force 100 member explained to me, they rely on inspiring awe because they lack lethal weapons—and if the prisoners all rose together to stampede them, even while handcuffed, they would be quickly overwhelmed.
The public understands how difficult this job must be. So, while those tasked with guarding Hamas terrorists are not exempt from accountability, depriving them of the presumption of innocence, not to mention humiliating them in public, was not something ordinary Israelis could easily stomach.
In a documentary on Kan 11, Israel’s public TV, recorded months later, the commander of the arresting force explained that the surprise arrest of the Force 100 members was intended to catch the suspects before they could hide their cellphones. However, if the military police did not intentionally shame the Force 100 reservists, the same cannot be said of the IDF’s chief prosecutor, Advocate General Tomer-Yerushalmi. The right-wing break-in to the Sde Teiman facility shook her deeply.
As Tomer-Yerushalmi explained in her letter of resignation, she saw the riot as the peak of a “destructive campaign … directed at law enforcement authorities within the IDF,” which included “severe allegations suggesting that we favor terrorists over our own troops.”
To protect the image of the unit under her command, which is responsible for upholding the rule of law even during war, Tomer-Yerushalmi felt she had to act. “As the head of the Military Advocate General, and out of a deep sense of responsibility toward the IDF, the unit, and my subordinates,” she wrote in the letter, “I approved the release of material to the media in an attempt to counter the false propaganda directed against the military law enforcement authorities.”
What she did, specifically, was leak the footage from the Sde Teiman security cameras to Channel 12, a platform famously hostile to the Netanyahu coalition, where it was reported on their evening news by one of the prime minister’s most virulent critics, legal correspondent Guy Peleg, who has said on live TV that “Netanyahu and his government are the worst enemies of Israel’s security.”
On Aug. 6, Channel 12 aired the leaked footage, and it immediately exploded on the world stage. Peleg’s narration over the footage on Channel 12 created the impression that we were seeing convincing, if circumstantial, evidence of sexual crimes.
Except viewers see nothing of the sort. What the video caught on security cameras shows is soldiers taking a prisoner behind a partition created by their riot shields in front of about 80 inmates. Peleg’s narration makes the scene appear sinister, commenting that the soldiers are “seemingly aware of the security cameras,” and so they take the prisoner to a corner where they “try to conceal their actions with shields.”
The shield barrier is standard procedure for Force 100 and is part of their training. Searches are not conducted in full view of the prisoner population, for reasons that should be obvious.
Yet for international social media and news outlets worldwide, Peleg’s narration served as proof that a sexual crime had indeed occurred—with the fact that the narrator was an Israeli giving it the semblance of a confession.
The rape accusation stuck. Minister of Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli commissioned a study of the damage done by the story, which concluded that the video “undermined support for Israel’s ongoing military operations, increased real threats to IDF soldiers, and caused a sharp rise in antisemitic discourse worldwide.”
The reaction in Israel was different, though. It did not take long before investigative journalist Ayala Hasson, an anchor on Kan 11, pointed out that the video itself comprised two parts, each with a different time stamp. On one of the dates, the prisoner in question was not in the facility. If true, then the “evidence” of the crime was not only leaked but also seems to have been deliberately doctored, either by the leakers or by Channel 12.
Without clear evidence to support the rape allegations, many began to perceive the footage as another in a series of libels against IDF soldiers—this one emanating from their own army’s brass.
If the move was designed to counter the “severe allegations suggesting that we favor terrorists over our own troops,” then it backfired.
At least half the country, possibly more, saw it in diametrically opposite terms. If Tomer-Yerushalmi’s office was the source of leaked footage designed to look like “evidence,” and if she leaked it to justify the premature accusations of a crime that, as it would turn out, the soldiers did not commit, then she was sacrificing Force 100 reservists so as to demonstrate her own unit’s righteousness. In other words, she robbed them of the presumption of innocence to make herself and her unit look good. In the tense atmosphere of the war, international criticism, boycotts, and diplomatic isolation, it seemed like the military prosecution was siding with the International Criminal Court at the Hague, not with the soldiers it was supposed to protect from it.
It was only in February 2025, seven months after the investigation began, that an indictment was finally submitted to the court. The indictment contained no mention of any sexual crime. In the court of law, the prosecution and the Military Police did not stand by their allegations, which they had fed to the media and which convicted the soldiers in the court of public opinion.
In the end, IDF law enforcement found no evidence, medical or otherwise, to support the crime they were originally investigating. Instead of sexual crimes, the soldiers were accused of “aggravated abuse” and causing “severe injuries.”
There is reason to believe, as we shall see, that the case for these accusations was weak as well. The left-wing press, which had amplified the smear, now minimized the rape charge and shifted instead to underscore the seriousness of the other charges.
Where, then, did the original accusation of rape originate?
To the extent that we can reconstruct it, the sequence of what transpired since the prisoner arrived at the Sde Teiman detention facility and until the indictment was submitted seems to have been as follows:
On July 5, 2024, the prisoner arrived from the Ofer penitentiary with a group of other prisoners. He was flagged by Shin Bet as especially dangerous. Three other newcomers with him were searched without incident. Unlike them, he resisted the search. As testified by the soldiers who searched him, he tried to bite one of them, he shouted to the other 80 or so prisoners in the same pen to rise and attack the soldiers, and he kicked them. They then used force to restrain him.
The full 18-minute video of the search does not show much, but it is clear that a commotion was going on behind the riot shields—though we cannot see it. There is no indication that any of the prisoner’s clothes were removed. After the search, the prisoner was returned to the sleeping mattress, like the other prisoners. The commander of the facility later reviewed the incident and concluded that the force used was not excessive.
After the search, at around midnight, the prisoner complained of a headache and was given pain medication. After that, he asked to go to the toilet and was granted permission. He then returned to his mattress.
At around 2:30 a.m., the prisoner complained of bleeding from his rectum. Paramedics referred him to the facility clinic, where he was seen by a physician. Upon examination, the physician reported large quantities of dried blood in the prisoner’s underwear. The physician assumed that the blood was the product of internal bleeding, since the patient said that he fell in the toilet and hurt his stomach. The condition was serious enough to merit hospitalization. The inmate was transferred to a hospital in Ashdod, where he was operated on.
At no point did the patient mention rape with an instrument, or any other form of sexual abuse, to any of the physicians treating him on the night of the injury or in Ashdod soon thereafter.
There is reason to believe that what the inmate did in the toilet was remove an object he attempted to smuggle in his rectum.
This corresponds to later medical reports that mention a cut four centimeters above the anus inside the rectum.
The opinions of several physicians concur that there were no injuries to the anus itself and hence there could not have been forced insertion. An opinion obtained by the defense from professor Alon Pikarsky, the chief surgeon at Hadassah University Hospital, who reviewed the medical findings (but did not examine the patient himself), asserts that there is no indication of forceful insertion and that the internal injury is more likely to have been caused by something the prisoner inserted himself. On the basis of these opinions, it seems likely that the prisoner injured himself when attempting to remove the object, when he went to the bathroom that night, following the forced search by Force 100.
There was also another cut on the prisoner’s buttocks. This seems to have been inflicted before his arrival in Sde Teiman. It could not have been inflicted during the search since, as sources in Force 100 explained, their intervention teams did not have sharp instruments on their person.
Following the surgery, which included the installment of a temporary bypass, Military Police interrogated the inmate for the first time on July 7, 2024. Here, too, he did not complain of sexual abuse. The matter seemed to rest there—for a while.
Meanwhile, human-rights organizations and the international press were criticizing Israel incessantly for its harsh treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Sde Teiman and elsewhere. Allegation of sexual abuse were also circulating—most likely an inversion of the many documented instances of rape, sexual violence, and torture that Hamas terrorists inflicted on Israelis on Oct. 7.
One organization in particular, the radical leftist Physicians for Human Rights, claimed to have testimonies of “sexual and gender-based violence” by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians, as early as November 2023, less than two months after the war began. The organization demanded the closure of the Sde Teiman facility; yet one of its former board members, professor Yoel Donchin, was employed at Sde Teiman. He told Haaretz after the arrest of the IDF soldiers that he saw the Palestinian inmate in question and reported the injury. He also told Kan 11 that it was his report that led to the arrest of the Force 100 soldiers.
In what looked like feigned incredulity, Donchin also told Haaretz that he could not believe that an Israeli jailer would do such a thing. He was sure, he said, that it was a case of prisoner-on-prisoner revenge. Donchin is an activist in an organization famous for smearing the IDF with the worst kinds of accusations, so his comments served to lend credibility and the appearance of impartiality to his version of what happened to the prisoner, but they should be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, in the same interview, he gave away his activism and the performative function of his statement by comparing Israelis to the Nazis: “If the state and the members of Knesset think there is no limit to the abuse of prisoners, they should come and kill them themselves, like the Nazis did.”
On July 18 and 21, the Shin Bet interviewed the inmate. (It denied the existence of the first interview, but prison records confirm it happened.) If Shin Bet obtained any pertinent information, we do not know what it is.
We do know that by the time Military Police raided the Sde Teiman facility on July 29, it still had almost nothing to go on to support an allegation of prisoner rape by instrumentation, of which they accused the soldiers, according to their account, from the time of their arrest. We do not know if they had anything other than the report Donchin bragged he composed, which, to the extent that they might have relied on it, was contradicted by the medical opinions of at least two other physicians who testified eight days before the arrest raid that there was no indication of forceful insertion (one in Sde Teiman and the other in the Ashdod hospital where the surgery was performed). Most important, the alleged victim did not complain of sexual abuse in any of his interviews. The soldiers were therefore arrested and publicly condemned for sexual assault before the inmate in question ever accused them of such acts.
The first time that the prisoner registered a complaint of sexual abuse was in an interview on Aug. 5, almost a week after the arrest and just before Peleg aired the video the advocate general leaked. At the time, her unit was searching for “proof” to fend off what she saw as an attack on the credibility of IDF law enforcement. It did not help that the interview, according to one of the soldiers who spoke Arabic, included this question by the prisoner: “What do I get in return if I tell?”
A deal may or may not have been struck with the prisoner. What we do know is that he was returned to Gaza on Oct. 13, 2025, which now makes it difficult to conclude the trial or obtain further testimony or physical evidence. If it was an honest mistake, it was a convenient one for anyone wanting to avoid him being cross-examined on the stand by the defense.
Shortly after the video aired on Channel 12, there was a public outcry over what was clearly a leak from within the investigating authorities. Then Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant ordered an investigation, and Tomer-Yerushalmi appointed her own deputy to look into the matter. At the time, it had not been revealed that she had approved the leak in coordination with her subordinates on a WhatsApp group, nor that the “investigation” was in fact a cover-up. She proceeded to coordinate that cover-up from then on.
Right-wing politicians, social media influencers, and conservative media outlets were quick to point out at the time that the investigation was a sham, since the advocate general herself was among the potential suspects. Having lied to the minister of defense that many people had had access to the footage, Tomer-Yerushalmi proceeded to lie to two consecutive IDF chiefs of staff, to the Supreme Court, and to the Knesset’s Committee on Security and Foreign Affairs.
The scandal ended up before the court in September 2024, when Choosing Life, a nonprofit founded by bereaved parents, filed a petition requesting an investigation into “the criminal leak” of the video, which it claimed was “doctored” and edited in a “false, manipulative way.” The plaintiffs pointed out that the IDF prosecution, under Tomer-Yerushalmi’s command, had a conflict of interest and could not credibly conduct the investigation. They demanded an independent investigation by Shin Bet, police, or other state agencies with no previous connection to the case.
The state asked the court to dismiss the petition. “There is no place for such claims, which cast doubt on the integrity of the authorities without any basis,” the state said in its response. In an affidavit submitted to the court, Advocate General Tomer-Yerushalmi lied outright: The investigation her office conducted had no leads whatever, she said. There were too many people exposed to the material, and some of them were not even bound by nondisclosure agreements. Therefore, she said, “there was no room or justification for continuing the investigation.”
In a second session of the court in December 2024, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara further argued that the leak did not cause damage to the state’s security and did not reveal any classified information. This statement later gave rise to yet-uncorroborated speculation that Baharav-Miara herself was a participant in the cover-up, since even after Tomer-Yerushalmi had confessed to the cover-up and resigned, Baharav-Miara did not order her arrest or even have her phone taken away. At the time, relying on a preliminary investigation by IDF Information Security, she told the court that the large number of persons exposed to the leaked material made it “technologically impossible to locate the source of the leak.”
The court did not grant the plaintiffs’ request. Instead, it handed down a decision intended to look like a compromise solution. Though it was not convinced that a conflict of interests for Tomer-Yerushalmi’s staff had been established—a curious assertion, to say the least—it nevertheless recommended that, to prevent the appearance of such a conflict, AG Baharav-Miara would oversee the investigation, “for example, by appointing a prosecutor from the state prosecution” to accompany the investigators’ work.
Still, it is not difficult to imagine that the major players in the various bureaucracies—the court, the AG, the military prosecution, the top IDF brass, and, not least, the Shin Bet under its rogue then director Ronen Bar—were all covering for each other. They share the same political persuasion and are all well versed in bureaucratic infighting: Baharav-Miara fought the cabinet tooth and nail to prevent Bar’s dismissal. Bar, who has close ties to the leaders of the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations, implicitly threatened the elected government with insubordination if it carried out the reform that was designed to limit the court’s power. Baharav-Miara was the court’s proxy in blocking legislation the court did not like, while Tomer-Yerushalmi served as a representative of the court’s progressive views in imposing constraints on the army that were widely considered excessive. She was also socially close to the leaders of the anti-Bibi protests.
The media, too, was implicated in this web of overlapping interests. Had the media not belonged to the same social class, advancing the same political agenda and covering for this clique as a whole, this tangle of conflicts of interests, personal stakes, selective enforcement, and weaponization of criminal law and state institutions would never have been possible.
The Sde Teiman leak was intended to protect the bureaucrats, as Tomer-Yerushalmi’s letter explicitly states. Which is why they pretended there were technological difficulties, when they could have simply checked the call log for Peleg’s phone.
So why did the cover-up fail, forcing Tomer-Yerushalmi to resign in disgrace?
The short answer is Maj. Gen. David Zini, the new Shin Bet director. Zini, who grew up in national religious circles, is not part of the clique. His appointment in May (which was finally approved at the end of September), against AG Baharav-Miara’s objections, changed the game.
The unraveling began just before Zini’s tenure began in October. Tomer-Yerushalmi wanted to promote the woman who was her PR person to the role of military judge.
The promotion required a routine polygraph check administered by Shin Bet.
The woman was asked routine questions, including about leaking classified documents. She denied leaking, and the machine indicated she may have been lying. Tomer-Yerushalmi’s former aide then came clean and described how her boss and her staff first leaked the Sde Taiman video, then lied about it.
The confession that emerged due to the polygraph test landed on Zini’s desk on his third day in office. He could have sat on it or buried it beneath a laconic report that the respondent failed the test and should not be promoted. Instead, Zini sent it to IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, who passed it on to Baharav-Miara, who reportedly told him not to report it to the minister.
He defied her—likely realizing that if he did not, then Zini would.
And so Tomer-Yerushalmi was caught red-handed. The release of the prisoner back to Gaza came, it was reported, shortly after the polygraph test and before its results were made public, which does not seem like a coincidence.
If Tomer-Yerushalmi leaked the video to justify the premature accusations of a crime that the soldiers did not commit, then she was sacrificing them so as to demonstrate her own unit’s righteousness.
The disgraced advocate general then announced she would take a vacation before submitting her aforementioned letter of resignation.
Two days later she was reported missing, and her car was found near the Tel Aviv shore in a place called HaTzuk Beach. She had left what appeared to be a suicide note. However, it turned out that she was alive and well.
Furthermore, the articulate way in which she explained that she was dazed and confused did not convince many that she was in a suicidal state of mind. Nor did it seem plausible that she misplaced her phone, as she claimed. She was arrested and then released to house arrest a few days later. After a massive search, her phone was found in the water by a swimmer, with a half-full battery. It strains credulity that it was underwater for a whole week. If she had any coconspirators, they will either have to flip on her or hope the buck stops with her.
Many unanswered questions remain:
While the court probably did not know it was being lied to, why did it accept arguments that were clearly implausible?
Why did AG Baharav-Miara not order the arrest of Tomer-Yerushalmi or the confiscation of her phone and her computer immediately after she tendered her resignation?
Did she not realize that Tomer-Yerushalmi, who had already done so much to cover her tracks, could use that time to destroy evidence and potentially coordinate testimonies?
Baharav-Miara herself will be at least a witness, if not a suspect, in the case. Yet she still refused to recuse herself from overseeing the investigation into Tomer-Yerushalmi, and snubbed the Knesset’s joint session of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, before which she was summoned to appear.
All this prompted Justice Minister Yariv Levin, author of the now-defunct judicial reform, to announce that Baharav-Miara would be barred from the investigation.
Her office retorted that the minister had no authority to bar her. To which Levin responded by appointing a special prosecutor—an institution hitherto unknown in Israel. This was a major vindication for Levin: The entire episode—the cover-up, the lack of transparency, the illicit intimacy between law enforcement and the judiciary (over which Israel has no oversight agencies), and the collective contempt for the normal legal process when these agencies investigate themselves—convincingly showed why his controversial legal reforms were necessary.
But Baharav-Miara was not about to relinquish control of the investigation in which she and her subordinates have been implicated, ever since she defended Tomer-Yerushalmi in court.
The matter reached the Supreme Court, which decided to bar Baharav-Miara from overseeing the investigation. The judges were clearly not happy to discover they had been lied to by the people whose good name they were helping to protect. Although it ruled against Levin’s special prosecutor based on a technicality, the court authorized him to appoint another (however, it suspended the new appointment last Thursday, to Levin’s understandable chagrin).
When a prosecutor is finally agreed on, it is not clear whether the investigation will manage to get to the bottom of the affair—especially the involvement of Baharav-Miara and her allies in Israel’s various bureaucracies. Nevertheless, the foundations of Israel’s juristocracy have been shaken. Rifts have opened among the various branches of what the Israeli right calls the “deep state.”
Three other dramatic events also recently transpired:
Tomer-Yerushalmi was hospitalized after overdosing on medication while under house arrest, in what appeared to be an attempted suicide.
One of the Force 100 soldiers, with a distinguished career in combat service, suffered a heart attack.
And the president of the military court has recommended that the IDF prosecution accept the request of the defense to halt all proceedings against the Force 100 accused soldiers—now that the alleged victim is no longer in Israeli custody.
There’s also a cultural aspect without which it is difficult to make sense of all this.
Israel’s contemporary elites look at the masses with contempt, viewing them as deplorables. In the eyes of these elites and the mainstream press, the riot in Sde Teiman was an attack on the rule of law, which Tomer-Yerushalmi upheld. Here were the right-wing proto-fascists wielding their pitchforks against the gatekeepers of impartial justice. In this view, the Force 100 soldiers and the rioters belonged to the same crowd of tribal ethno-nationalists who share a common contempt for liberal values and human rights.
The right saw it very differently: Unpatriotic globalist progressive elites were weaponizing the law in the middle of a war to show the world they are better than the rest of us. Indeed, Israel’s progressive elites have come to define themselves in opposition to those mostly non-Ashkenazi masses, whom they view as too Jewish, too provincial, and too nationalistic.
Tomer-Yerushalmi may argue that her leak was in the wider public interest: to show international jurists that Israel is willing to use force to apprehend its own soldiers and thereby deny international tribunals a legal reason to intervene. Implausible as it seems to most of us, she may well have believed that throwing Force 100 under the bus was a convincing demonstration of Israel’s high-minded moral standards.
Yet it seems that in this case, as in others, identity trumps ideology.
To imagine themselves as members of the enlightened global elite, Israeli progressives must define themselves against the Israel that “right-thinking” people abhor. The beautiful people of Spain or the Netherlands or Berkeley, California, don’t particularly care what the facts of Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors are or whether the Israel they have constructed through sloganeering about “colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” is real or a malevolent fiction.
Expressing their abhorrence of a brutal rape that never happened in Sde Teiman was an opportunity for Israel’s elites to show whose side they were on: their fellow elites or the deplorables. Nothing about their choice should be surprising.
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