Charges have been dropped against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at a military facility.
Israel has dropped all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at a military detention center, Israeli media reported, closing a case that became one of the most divisive in the country’s recent history.
The military announced the decision this week, more than a year after Israeli television broadcast footage of the assault on Sde Teiman, a desert facility holding Palestinian detainees during Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, sparking international outrage.
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The incident, which occurred on July 5, 2024, led to the detainee being admitted to the hospital. A doctor at the center, Professor Yoel Donchin, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that he was so shocked by the man’s condition that he initially assumed it was the work of a rival armed group.
The military prosecution itself described soldiers stabbing the detainee with a sharp object near his rectum, causing rib fractures, a punctured lung and an internal tear.
The US State Department called the allegations “horrible” at the time and demanded a swift and full investigation. “There should be zero tolerance for any sexual abuse, rape, of any detainee, period,” said then-State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the army’s top lawyer who brought the indictment and authorized the leak of the footage to Channel 12, resigned last year and was subsequently arrested on charges including fraud, breach of trust and obstruction of justice.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the leak of the video, not the incident itself, as perhaps the worst “public relations attack” Israel has ever faced.
Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the leftist Hadash-Ta’al faction, previously told Al Jazeera: “They (the government) want to cover up the rape.”
“That’s why they are dealing with prosecutors and not with the crime itself,” Touma-Suleiman said, adding: “This is how the judiciary works. These are the so-called checks and balances. Look at them, they are criminals.”
The initial arrest of the soldiers in 2024 drew the ire of members of Israel’s far-right government, some of whom physically stormed the Sde Teiman facility in protest.
The dropping of the charges is likely to increase scrutiny over Israel’s accountability record, amid growing doubts about the independence of its legal system.
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has described the country’s detention system as a “network of torture camps.”
According to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, a human rights organization, despite hundreds of alleged cases of abuse reported since October 2023, Israeli authorities have brought charges in only two incidents, with no prison service staff charged.
A report by the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din found that 93.6 percent of investigations into ideologically motivated crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2005 ended without indictment, a record it describes not as oversight but as deliberate policy.
A wide-ranging report by the UN Human Rights Office published in January found that of more than 1,500 Palestinians killed between 2017 and September 2025, Israeli authorities opened 112 investigations and achieved only one conviction.
Israel maintains that its forces act within Israeli military and international law and that it is thoroughly investigating alleged abuses.
