For those who thought it would never happen, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually discovered that actions of Israeli officials can cause “enormous reputational damage” to the country. However, it wasn’t the ethnic cleansing policy or the cutting off of all aid to the Gaza civilians that he was referring to. It was the publication of a video of Israeli soldiers abusing and torturing a Palestinian prisoner. Netanyahu wasn’t responding to the abuse and torture—his concern was the matter having been made public.
As reported by the Times of Israel, Netanyahu declared on Nov. 2 that the August 2024 leak “caused enormous reputational damage to Israel, to the IDF, and to our soldiers.... It is perhaps the most serious public relations attack Israel has experienced since its founding—I cannot recall one so concentrated and intense. This requires an independent and impartial inquiry, and I expect that such an investigation will indeed take place.”
A video of the incident at the infamous Sde Teiman detention facility was broadcast by Channel 12 on August 6, 2024. In October 2024, a UN commission found thousands of detainees had been subjected to “widespread and systematic abuse” in Israeli military camps and detention facilities that amounted to a “war crime and crime against humanity of torture,” and Sde Teiman was the most notorious.
Finally, in February 2025, five soldiers were indicted for abusing the prisoner, leaving him with severe injuries, including broken ribs and a tear in his rectum. Then, last week, on Oct. 31, military advocate general Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi admitted to approving the leak of the video and resigned from her position. Her resignation letter had explained that she had authorized the release of the footage “in an attempt to counter the false propaganda directed against the military law enforcement authorities” for prosecuting the soldiers, as her staff faced attacks from opponents. She referred to mob incidents.
One such event occurred when Israeli military police in 2024 had gone to detain the five soldiers on suspicion of abusing the Palestinian victim. Then, an irate crowd, including three Knesset members from Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, gathered around the military base and dozens of them surged inside. Her explanation of her release of the video on Oct. 31 was the occasion of Defense Minister Israel Katz accusing her of spreading “a blood libel” against the IDF soldiers.
There was a time when actually killing tens of thousands of women and children was thought to qualify as a blood libel. And officials who defied the mob insanity and exposed such crimes were praised for their courage and integrity.
