A Resignation in the Ranks: How a Leaked Video of Abuse Fractures Israel’s Moral Self-Image 

The resignation of Israel’s top military lawyer, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, was a direct consequence of the political firestorm surrounding a leaked video showing the severe abuse of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman base, an incident that exposed a deep fracture in Israel’s self-image as a “moral army.”

The leak not only triggered international outrage and confirmed prior UN findings of systematic abuse but also ignited domestic political pressure from factions who saw the investigation itself as a betrayal, ultimately placing the Military Advocate General in an impossible position where her duty to uphold military law was framed as slandering Israeli soldiers, leading to her departure and highlighting a critical erosion of internal accountability in the face of wartime brutality.

A Resignation in the Ranks: How a Leaked Video of Abuse Fractures Israel’s Moral Self-Image 

The resignation of a nation’s top military lawyer is never a mundane event. It is a seismic tremor within the rigid hierarchy of a state’s most powerful institution, signaling a profound crisis of conscience, authority, or both. When Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, Israel’s Military Advocate General (MAG), submitted her request to step down, it was not merely a personnel change. It was the culmination of a scandal that strikes at the very heart of Israel’s long-cherished identity as a “moral and law-abiding army,” forcing a painful national reckoning played out on the global stage. 

The catalyst was a leaked video from the Sde Teiman military base—a facility that has become a symbol of the deep moral ambiguities of the ongoing conflict. The footage, described in chilling detail by military prosecutors, depicts acts of such specific brutality that they transcend the vague term “abuse.” Soldiers are alleged to have stabbed a Palestinian detainee’s bottom with a sharp object, penetrating near his rectum, an act that resulted in cracked ribs, a punctured lung, and an internal rectal tear. This is not the fog-of-war violence of a chaotic battlefield; this is deliberate, sustained torture. 

The Unraveling: From Internal Investigation to International Outcry 

The story, as officially reported, follows a predictable arc of institutional response. The military had, to its credit, already filed charges against five reservist soldiers in February. An internal mechanism was functioning. However, the leak of the video changed everything. It ripped the incident from the controlled confines of a military court and thrust it into the glaring light of public consciousness, both in Israel and abroad. 

The leak created a dual crisis for General Tomer-Yerushalmi. Externally, it fueled the fires of international condemnation. A October 2024 UN commission finding of “widespread and systematic abuse” amounting to a “war crime and crime against humanity of torture” was given visceral, undeniable proof. Israel’s flat denial of these accusations suddenly rang hollow against the pixelated reality of the video. 

Internally, the leak triggered a political firestorm. In her resignation letter, Tomer-Yerushalmi pointedly acknowledged that her office had released information to the media after “politically motivated protests tried to thwart the investigation.” This is a critical insight into the domestic pressure cooker. It reveals a faction within Israeli society and politics that views any internal scrutiny of soldier conduct during wartime as a form of betrayal, an giving of ammunition to Israel’s critics. 

This is the impossible position the MAG found herself in. Her duty was to uphold military law, but doing so effectively made her a target for those who believe that in a total war against Hamas, the rules must bend, or even break. 

Sde Teiman: From Obscure Base to Epitome of a Systemic Problem 

To understand the gravity of this resignation, one must understand what Sde Teiman represents. It is not a random outpost but a primary holding facility for detainees from Gaza. Described by rights groups like HaMoked as a place where Palestinians are held in “abysmal conditions,” it has been a focal point of allegations for months. The UN report citing “thousands” of detainees subjected to abuse suggests that the incident in the video may not be an isolated atrocity, but rather a visible symptom of a systemic infection. 

The argument often presented in defense of such facilities is one of grim necessity: that in a war against a terrorist organization that embeds itself within the civilian population, mass detention and aggressive interrogation are essential tools for intelligence gathering. However, the nature of the abuse described—sexualized torture causing a punctured lung—has no conceivable intelligence value. It speaks instead to dehumanization, to a brutalization of the occupier as much as the occupied, and to a catastrophic breakdown of discipline. 

The Two Fronts of the War: Battlefield and Legitimacy 

Israel has long insisted it fights a war on two fronts: the military campaign against Hamas and the “hasbara” battle for international legitimacy. The resignation of the MAG signifies a catastrophic failure on the second front. Defense Minister Israel Katz’s reaction to her resignation was telling: “Those who slander IDF soldiers have no place in the army.” In this framing, the chief military lawyer, by pursuing justice, became a slanderer. The message is that institutional unity in the face of external criticism is more important than internal accountability. 

This creates an irreconcilable conflict. Can an army truly be “moral and law-abiding” if its chief legal officer is hounded from her post for doing her job? The very act of investigating the crime became, in the eyes of some, a greater betrayal than the crime itself. This moral inversion is what makes Tomer-Yerushalmi’s resignation so significant. It is a stark admission that the system designed to police itself is buckling under political weight. 

The Human Cost and the Enduring Stain 

Lost in the geopolitics and institutional wrangling is the Palestinian man at the center of the storm. His name is not in the headlines, but his shattered body is the evidence. A punctured lung and an internal rectal tear are not abstract legal concepts; they are life-altering, agonizing injuries that tell a story of utter powerlessness and cruelty. He is one body, but he stands as a proxy for the thousands mentioned in the UN report, their suffering largely unseen and unrecorded. 

The long-term consequences of this scandal are profound. For Palestinians and the international community, it serves as indelible proof of their worst allegations, eroding any remaining trust in Israel’s capacity for self-regulation. For the Israeli public, it deepens a pre-existing schism between those who see such acts as a stain on the nation’s soul and those who dismiss them as inevitable, if regrettable, necessities of a brutal war. 

The resignation of Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi is not the end of the story. It is a punctuation mark in a much darker narrative. It reveals that the greatest threat to an army’s moral fabric may not always be the enemy at the gate, but the corrosion of principle from within.

The video from Sde Teiman captured a moment of brutal abuse, but the resignation that followed exposes a far more complex and enduring tragedy: the struggle of a nation to hold onto its self-defined identity when the images from its own bases tell a very different, and more horrifying, story. The legal inquiry will continue, but the damage to the ideal of a “purity of arms” may already be done.