In a decision that has drawn international condemnation and reignited debates about systemic human rights violations against Palestinian detainees, the Israeli military has authorized the return to reserve duty of five soldiers linked to the severe torture and sexual assault of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility in 2024.
According to a Thursday report from Israeli outlet Haaretz, Israel’s army chief Eyal Zamir greenlit the return of the service members from Unit 100, the specialized unit tasked with guarding detainees in Israeli custody. The move comes just one month after all criminal charges against the soldiers were unexpectedly dropped, with no internal military probe ever launched into the brutal incident.
The full scope of the abuse was first exposed when surveillance footage of the attack was leaked to Israeli media in August 2024, one month after a far-right Israeli mob rioted to protest military police questioning of the implicated soldiers. The leaked footage shows multiple Palestinian detainees bound and blindfolded on the facility floor, before a group of reservists pulls one detainee aside and uses riot shields to block the camera view of their assault.
Following the attack, the detainee was rushed to hospital with life-altering injuries: broken ribs, a punctured lung, a ruptured bowel, and severe anal trauma. Initially filed in February, the original indictment detailed 15 minutes of unrelenting violence: the accused repeatedly kicked the detainee, stomped on his body, struck him with clubs, dragged him across the ground, and deployed a taser on multiple areas including his head. One soldier also stabbed the detainee in the buttocks, causing a full tear in the rectal wall. Two of the suspects failed polygraph tests when asked about inserting an object into the detainee’s anus and covering for the perpetrator, with examiners confirming their denials were deceptive.
Professor Yoel Donchin, a former medical officer at Sde Teiman, told Haaretz he was stunned by the brutality of the attack. “He arrived, and we saw he had a stab wound in the anus,” Donchin said. “I saw how the soldiers behaved there, how they brought in detainees and forced them to sing songs. I saw a wounded man who had been abused and beaten severely.”
Despite the overwhelming evidence captured on camera and detailed in the original indictment, Military Advocate General Itai Ofir ordered all charges withdrawn last month. Ofir justified the decision citing a “defense of justice” argument tied to what he called improper conduct by senior military prosecution and IDF law enforcement officials, as well as “complexities regarding the existing evidentiary basis.” He also noted that after the detainee was released back to the Gaza Strip, additional legal barriers emerged for the case.
This decision is far from an isolated incident. Human rights investigators and UN experts have documented that the Israeli military almost never holds service members accountable for accusations of abusing Palestinian detainees, and reports of abuse, torture, and sexual violence have spiked dramatically since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war in October 2023.
Last month, a group of UN experts warned that torture has become “state doctrine” in Israel, enabled by decades of systemic impunity and political protection for perpetrators. “Since the onset of the genocide, the Israeli prison system has degenerated into a laboratory of calculated cruelty,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine. A UN inquiry has confirmed that “Sexual and gender-based violence is increasingly used as a method of war by Israel to destabilise, dominate, oppress and destroy the Palestinian people.”
Earlier this month, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor released a groundbreaking report compiling hundreds of testimonies from former detainees, concluding that the sexual torture of Palestinian detainees from Gaza constitutes an “organised state policy.” The report details widespread abuses including rape with foreign objects, the use of trained dogs to assault detainees, and repeated sexual assault. One 42-year-old female former detainee from northern Gaza, who was held at Sde Teiman, gave harrowing testimony of being bound naked to a metal table and raped repeatedly by two masked soldiers over two days. She was left shackled naked and bleeding overnight before the assault resumed, and the entire ordeal was filmed. During interrogation, while she was suspended by her wrists, soldiers threatened to release the footage publicly if she refused to cooperate. She described her experience as “another genocide behind walls” and said she repeatedly wished for death to end her suffering.
Multiple independent investigations by rights groups and media outlets, including Middle East Eye, have corroborated these claims, documenting widespread, systemic sexual violence against Palestinian detainees across Israel’s prison system.