IDF sources were skeptical on Monday about reports from Channel 14 that Defense Minister Israel Katz would return to reservist service the five Force 100 prison guards connected to the Sde Teiman scandal of beating a Palestinian detainee.
Although the five guards were technically exonerated on March 12 when the indictment against them was cancelled, the language and justifications used for the cancellation were phrased much closer to the wording used for closing a case due to "insufficient evidence for a conviction" versus "the accusation was groundless."
In other words, the IDF legal division did not determine that the five guards were blameless, but rather that, in the exceptional circumstances of the case, the harm to their rights to a fair trial and the harm to the evidence and to the prosecution's continued ability to move the indictment forward warranted withdrawing the indictment.
In fact, IDF Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Itay Offir specifically found that there were a number of significant elements of evidence which seemed to support a conviction, finding only that these elements were incomplete, for example, because the Palestinian detainee-victim had been sent back to Gaza in October 2025 without testifying.
In such circumstances, while the guards certainly no longer have any criminal charges hanging over their heads, it would be highly unusual to return them to any kind of standard service.
Moreover, Katz, as defense minister, has the power to approve or hold up certain senior appointments, but not the power to order the IDF to return soldiers to service who have been caught up in legal proceedings.
IDF sources said they were surprised by the news, had not heard about it before it was reported by Channel 14, and appeared skeptical that any reinstatement would actually occur.
In other words, Katz cannot necessarily order the IDF to reinstate the, but at most can put political pressure on IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir is to do so, but Zamir has shown a readiness to defy Katz if he views the defense minister as acting politically.
Alternatively, Katz may have no real intention of reinstating them, and the leaked announcement may be solely to play for political points as the country nears elections.
At press time, Katz's office had not responded to inquiries about whether he had the authority and legal basis to reinstate the guards.
When Offir cancelled the indictment, he explained that the evidentiary difficulties in the case combined with the scandal of the leaked video surrounding the case leading to the former prosecutorial team themselves being probed, made it too difficult to continue the case.
The controversial case
The case has been the most controversial alleged war crimes case to come out of the war to date: with many Israelis slamming the IDF prosecution for going after the soldiers and many lawyers and critics of Israel blasting the prosecution for moving too slowly on the case, and now closing it.
External major elements to the caes include that much of the government had turned against the Israeli legal establishment over a range of issues by the time the indictment was filed and that much of the world was up in arms over alleged torture at Sde Teiman as early as fall 2023, with little action by Israeli officials to address those criticism until the Israeli Supreme Court ordered Sde Teiman closed in mid-2024.
The case was filed by Offir's predecessor, Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi, in February 2025 against five soldiers for the alleged crimes.
Yerushalmi resigned in October 2025 over her illegal leaking of a video of the alleged beating prior to trial, where it could have been legally and publicly presented.
Offir replaced her a month later.
From a domestic political perspective in terms of the current government, the safest move was always to tank the Sde Teiman case.
Offir did not call the case a "blood libel" as some coalition politicians have done, but simply closed it based on technical problems, which he blamed on his predecessor.
The technical problems were real and many: Tomer Yerushalmi leaked a video of the five defendants allegedly beating the detainee, harming some of their fair trial rights, the lead prosecutor for the case Lt. Col. Lior Ayash is one of the officials under a criminal probe which disrupted the progress and management of the case, and the government decided to release the Palestinian detainee who was beaten back to Gaza without having testified in court.
No official has ever explained the rationale for why the Palestinian detainee was released without taking pre-trial testimony, a recognized procedure for special circumstances, which was famously used against former prime minister Ehud Olmert in the Talansky Affair.
The IDF statement announcing the decision made it clear that IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir was ready to support Offir in whichever direction he ultimately decided to go.
Closing the case?
But closing the case may be problematic not only for Offir's standing within Israel's legal community, but also before the International Criminal Court.
All of the technical issues above are real, but all of them can also be overcome, and to close the case, Offir had to sidestep the medical report, which appears far more damning against the five soldiers than the widely discussed video.
The five IDF soldiers, broadly speaking, do not deny that they had a physical altercation with the detainee.
Mostly, they claim self-defense and that they had to get him under control.
But the medical report reveals seven of his ribs were broken and that an object was either shoved up his anus or that his buttocks was stabbed with an object.
These do not seem like actions consistent with merely getting control over one detainee in self-defense.
Offir said that the medical report was significant evidence, but would have failed to get a conviction at trial without more corroborating evidence, especially given the absence of the victim to testify.
The much-defamed video was not doctored. It, in fact, seems to show IDF soldiers beating the detainee. It is just that it was edited to shorten it from many hours of footage where nothing happened, to the moments when the more critical events occurred.
However, Offir noted that many of the activities and alleged beatings were set in a spot where seeing who exactly did what was obscured in the footage.
Still, ignoring all of the above evidence could permanently harm his standing with the Israeli legal community and might make it harder for him to manage the IDF legal division, or the legal community may be so on its back heels right now from a variety of other crises that it might not have wanted to spend energy fighting on this issue.
To date, Offir has received high marks from a bunch of IDF legal officials who remained in their posts between his and Tomer-Yerushalmi's tenures.
The ICC will likely reject Israeli explanations that it had taken the beating issue seriously, but that a strange series of events, including Tomer Yerushalmi's personal meltdown, had simply unwound the case on technical grounds.
But many Israeli legal officials are more doubtful at this stage about getting any fair hearing before the ICC.