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A great scandal currently playing out in Israel is highly revealing of the fault lines in its society when it comes to the Palestinians. Israeli society is divided between those who think the scandal is about the leaking of a video showing the abuse of Palestinian detainees and those who think the crime is the actual abuse. Yes, for many, the leak is the crime, not the depicted rape.
The reaction in much of Israel has been that the leak was an act of treason, a betrayal rather than an expose of a major crime. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented the leak as a hasbara fail. “It is perhaps the most serious public relations attack Israel has experienced since its founding,” he said. Others might suggest the Gaza genocide is more damaging than a video leak.
This happened in Sde Teiman, an Israeli detention camp in the Negev desert, about 30 km from Gaza, on July 29, 2024, when Israeli military police arrested nine Israeli soldiers suspected of abusing a Palestinian prisoner. The reaction from the Israeli right was swift and furious. Even members of the Knesset joined the mob that stormed the base. Within the Knesset, Likud members debated the legitimacy of raping Palestinian prisoners, with one stating: “If he is a Nukhba (Hamas militant), everything is legitimate to do. Everything.”
The following month, Channel 12 aired a video showing the abuse — it pictured what many argue was the rape of a Palestinian detainee, a clear war crime. This is backed up by medical evidence.
If the leak was the crime, the leaker was the criminal and the rapists the heroes. This is how it played out. The five soldiers charged over the abuse have been portrayed as heroes by many in Israel. Meanwhile, the leaker has been arrested and repeatedly threatened, largely online. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who was the Israeli military’s top lawyer, admitted to leaking the video. She is now the traitor.
The whistleblower will be sentenced; the rapists will go free. This echoes the total lack of accountability inside Israel and internationally for the crimes its forces commit. Israeli settlers have benefited from this for decades.
The Palestinian detainee was released back to Gaza in October 2024. This is convenient for the authorities in Israel, as they did not take any testimony from him.
The reaction in much of Israel has been that the leak was an act of treason, a betrayal rather than an expose of a major crime.
Chris Doyle
And the broader issue of the Tomer-Yerushalmi story is the way she has been consistently pressured not to investigate crimes allegedly committed in Gaza. She leaked the video because of the frustration of being blocked by the Israeli right from doing her job.
Israeli abuse and rape of Palestinians is an issue that barely makes it into the international media orbit. When it does, it is often diluted and echoes the narrative of the Israeli right. Only after complaints did the BBC, for example, change its headline from “Israeli military’s ex-top lawyer arrested as scandal over video leak deepens” to one that referenced the alleged detainee abuse. The broader failure has been to ignore how Israel treats prisoners and detainees — the tortured bodies, the disappeared, the corpses.
Palestinians held at Sde Teiman have alleged they suffered torture and sexual abuse, including rape. A UN commission listed 75 deaths of Palestinians in Israeli custody between Oct. 7, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2025, including at Sde Teiman. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have published detailed reports on this. In May 2024, three Israeli employees confirmed much of this to CNN. This was a facility that was feared. It was notorious.
Last year, a report by a UN commission of inquiry alleged that thousands of child and adult detainees from Gaza had been “subjected to widespread and systematic abuse, physical and psychological violence, and sexual and gender-based violence amounting to the war crime and crime against humanity of torture and the war crime of rape and other forms of sexual violence.”
Sde Teiman may be the most infamous detention center, but others also have an appalling record. At Rakefet, Palestinian detainees have been held in an underground facility with no access to sunlight. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, shows no remorse. “This is terrorists’ natural place, under the ground,” he said. Ben-Gvir loves to boast about how he treats Palestinian detainees — or “terrorists,” as he always depicts them, regardless of evidence.
Much of the international media and political classes do not want to highlight coverage that proves Israel is not the democratic, law-abiding, Western nation of the widespread myth. Large elements of the media see such stories as shattering this carefully constructed narrative: the barbaric Arab-Muslim against the civilized Israeli Jew. Sexual abuse and torture simply do not fit, just as genocide and apartheid do not fit.
Sde Teiman is Israel’s Guantanamo, its Abu Ghraib. It is a wake-up call to all those who still somehow consider the Israeli state a bastion of democracy and liberal values when barbarism is at the helm.
• Chris Doyle is director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding in London. X: @Doylech