Israel rocked by scandal as top military lawyer resigns, goes missing, is found and thrown into jail

JERUSALEM (AP) – Until last week, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was the Israeli army’s top lawyer. Now she is behind bars and at the center of a scandal rocking the country after a bizarre sequence of events that included her abrupt resignation, a brief disappearance and a frantic search that led authorities to find her on a Tel Aviv beach.

The soap opera-worthy saga was touched off last week by Tomer-Yerushalmi’s explosive admission that she approved the leak of a surveillance video at the center of a politically divisive investigation into allegations of severe abuse against a Palestinian at a notorious Israeli military prison.

The video shows part of an assault in which Israeli soldiers are accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee.

By leaking the video last year, Tomer-Yerushalmi aimed to expose the seriousness of the allegations her office was investigating. Instead, it triggered fierce criticism from Israel’s hard-line political leaders. After Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned under pressure last week, her critics continued to heave personal insults.

She left a cryptic note for her family and abandoned her car near a beach. That led to fears she had taken her own life and prompted an intensive search that included the use of military drones.

She was found alive at the beach Sunday night, at which point more vitriol against her was unleashed.

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

After it was revealed that one of Tomer-Yerushalmi’s phones had disappeared, right-wing politicians and commentators began to accuse her of staging a suicide attempt as a way to destroy potential evidence.

The extraordinary episode shows two years of devastating war have done little to heal a country that was deeply divided even before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack. It also makes Tomer-Yerushalmi the latest in a long line of top security officials who have either left office or been forced out, most of them to be replaced by people considered loyal to Netanyahu and his hardline government.

At a court hearing Monday, the judge said Tomer-Yerushalmi’s detention would be extended until Wednesday on suspicion of committing fraud, breach of trust and obstruction of justice. While the investigation into her actions continues, she is being held at a women’s prison in central Israel.

Israeli media reported that former chief military prosecutor Col. Matan Solomesh was also arrested in connection with the leak investigation. The prime minister’s office has refused to comment on Solomesh’s arrest.

The fury over the leaked video reveals the depth of polarization in Israel – and at least for the moment, keeps the media and the public focused on the leak and not the allegations of abuse.

The assault occurred on July 5, 2024, at the Sde Teiman military prison, according to the indictment against the accused soldiers. The AP has investigated allegations of inhumane treatment and abuse at Sde Teiman that predate those in the surveillance video.

The video, which has been aired by Israeli news, shows soldiers taking a detainee into an area they cordoned off with shields in an apparent attempt to hide their actions. The indictment said the soldiers assaulted the Palestinian prisoner and sodomized him with a knife, causing multiple injuries.

A medical staffer familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety said the detainee arrived at a civilian hospital in life-threatening condition with blunt trauma to the abdomen and the chest and fractured ribs.

He said the detainee underwent surgery for a perforated rectum and was released back to Sde Teiman days later. The staffer said it was the most extreme abuse case he was familiar with from Sde Teiman.

When military police came to Sde Teiman in July to detain the soldiers suspected of abuse, they scuffled with protesters opposed to the arrests. Later, hundreds of violent protesters broke into the detention center.

In her resignation letter, Tomer-Yerushalmi wrote that she had exposed evidence of the abuse to counter the idea that the military was unfairly targeting its own soldiers. That idea was creating a danger to the military’s law enforcement, she said, citing the break-in.

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

“Unfortunately, this basic understanding – that there are actions which must never be taken even against the vilest of detainees – no longer convinces everyone,” 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.

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 intense rhetoric over the past few days is reminiscent of what it was like in Israel immediately before the Oct. 7 attack that launched the war in Gaza, Plesner said. At the time, the public was deeply divided over Netanyahu’s push to overhaul the judiciary.

The concern for a few hours Sunday night about Tomer-Yerushalmi’s fate should serve as a “stop sign” to the Israeli public – and especially to commentators who derided her personally, Plesner said.

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

It felt especially symbolic, he said, that Tomer-Yerushalmi was in court while the Israeli government held its official memorial ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Many regard the assassination as Israel’s lowest point in terms of divisions and incitement among the Israeli public, and worry that the dramatic events of the weekend foreshadow Israel’s return to a similar period of internal strife.

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