https://arab.news/2mw6m
Israeli politics is no stranger to scandals that shake the entire country. But the case revolving around Sde Teiman, where five Israeli soldiers allegedly abused a Palestinian detainee, surpasses the worst nightmare of the unholy trinity of moral bankruptcy, anarchic autocracy and reputational harm that the current government has brought on the country and its society and continues to do so with each day it remains in power.
The mere idea that, by the end of this alarming affair, it is Advocate General Maj. Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who was fulfilling her duty to bring to justice those who have evidently committed a crime, might end up in jail for leaking a video of the abuse, while those who seem on this clip to be committing this abuse may well walk free, is shocking and unnerving to the extreme. Her principal “crime” is that she wanted justice for a detainee who allegedly suffered horrific injuries at the hands of soldiers who served as prison guards, not to justify allegedly lying in the process.
In the flood of political and media spins around the leak of the video clip, there is a danger it would be forgotten that this affair came to light because a detained Palestinian at Sde Teiman, Israel’s version of the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention camp, was hospitalized with broken ribs and a tear in the wall of his rectum, raising the suspicion of rape. The suspicion is that this happened after he was reportedly beaten and assaulted by Israeli army reservists of “Force 100,” a military police reserve unit tasked with guarding the detention camp.
