IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir and Defense Minister Israel Katz on Sunday met to discuss who will become the IDF’s new chief lawyer following the sudden resignation of IDF Military Advocate-General Maj.-Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi.
At press time, there was no clear lead candidate. In a dizzying series of developments, Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned her post on Friday an hour after Katz tried to fire her for the leaking of a video in the Sdei Teiman abuse of Palestinian prisoners’ cases.
In her letter of resignation, she stated, “I approved the leaking of evidence to the media in an attempt to confront the false propaganda against the law enforcement officials in the military. I take full responsibility for all of the evidence which was sent out to the media by this unit. Based on this responsibility, I also have decided to conclude my role as the MAG.”
This admission changed the legal and political picture, as initially it seemed that Tomer-Yerushalmi might only be a third-party witness in the case, but she has now emerged as a central defendant. Her admission and disappearance on Sunday also led to a search for her, where, for some hours, there were concerns she had committed suicide, though she was eventually found alive and physically healthy.
Two potential replacements for the MAG have already been disqualified, leaving Zamir and Katz to look farther afield for a qualified replacement who is regarded as detached enough from Tomer-Yerushalmi to handle her case and the IDF legal division decisions objectively.
IDF Col. Gal Asahel initially expected to replace Yerushalmi
Originally, her deputy, IDF Col. Gal Asahel, was expected to be the lead candidate to replace her.
However, there are increasing indications that he may also be probed in the case as part of an alleged cover-up for the leak. At the very least, the fact that Asahel cleared Tomer-Yerushalmi of any charges, when she now has openly admitted wrongdoing, draws into question his objectivity or competency.
Next, former deputy attorney-general Raz Nizri, who lost in a close race in the last round of running to become attorney-general, was floated publicly as a possibility. Nizri is part of the legal establishment but is considered to be representative of its right wing, notably since he opposed many of the charges filed against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and tends to defer heavily to the defense establishment on legal disputes.
However, Nizri confirmed to The Jerusalem Post that he was not considering the position.
In addition, despite his general right-wing bona fides, some members of the coalition, such as in the Otzma Yehudit party, still hold a grudge against him for supporting harsh detention measures and prosecutions against extreme right-wing Israelis in the murder of the Palestinian Dawabsheh family at Duma in 2015.
Meanwhile, several of the Force 100 defendants in the Sdei Teiman case protested with their lawyer, Adi Keidar, in front of the High Court of Justice over the leak of the video and the case against them continuing. Keidar said that the exposure of the leak showed that the entire investigation and case were polluted by improper considerations and that the case should be dismissed.
Moreover, he said that the legal establishment should apologize to the defendants for initially accusing them of grave sexual crimes, something that the prosecution later backed off somewhat, reducing the description to shoving an object up a Palestinian detainee’s anus.
Likewise, the defendant-soldiers vowed they would be more public with their criticism of how they had been – in their narrative – mistreated by the legal establishment. While the Force 100 defendants did protest publicly, they kept their faces covered in order to maintain their anonymity, which the IDF prosecution and courts have preserved, though many defendants complain that their identities were partially leaked.
The defendants and their lawyers have claimed throughout that they were mistreated during the process of their arrest in order to frame them as criminals in the public eye before their trial. In contrast, the legal establishment has pointed out that it received weathering attacks from the political class for arresting the Force 100 defendants at all and later that many extremist right-wing activists broke into an IDF base to try to free them.
There are multiple Sdei Teiman cases. On February 6, an IDF court sentenced a reservist who had abused Palestinian Gazan detainees in Sde Teiman to seven months imprisonment in the first major jail term handed down to a soldier relating to the war. Given that the defendant-soldier had spent around 80 days in prison after he was first arrested, he was sent back to prison for around four and half months.
In the “large” Sdei Teiman abuse case, five defendant-soldiers were indicted on February 19 for sexual assault.
Pre-indictment hearings were held in the “large” case in November 2024, and sources denied to the Post that there had been delays due to fears of political fallout from the right-wing coalition government, despite the case dating back to summer 2024.
However, in light of the latest developments, it is also possible that the indictments were delayed by the separate probe into the leaking of a surveillance video from the Sde Teiman detention facility, which allegedly showed soldiers severely abusing a Palestinian detainee.
The IDF legal division was at least partially motivated to probe the issue of detainee abuse at Sdei Teiman following a damning report by The New York Times on the issue in June 2024 after it received access to the base and some of the detainees.