Until last week, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was the Israeli army’s top lawyer. Now she is behind bars and at the center of a scandal rocking the country after a bizarre sequence of events that included her abrupt resignation, a brief disappearance and a frantic search that led authorities to find her on a Tel Aviv beach.
The soap opera-worthy saga was touched off last week by Tomer-Yerushalmi’s explosive admission that she approved the leak of a surveillance video at the center of a politically divisive investigation into allegations of severe abuse against a Palestinian at a notorious Israeli military prison.
The video shows part of an assault in which Israeli soldiers are accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee.
By leaking the video last year, Tomer-Yerushalmi aimed to expose the seriousness of the allegations her office was investigating. Instead, it triggered fierce criticism from Israel’s hard-line political leaders. After Tomer-Yerushalmi resigned under pressure last week, her critics continued to heave personal insults.
TVNL Comment: This woman is being villified and hounded for validating the truth about the sexual torture of a Palestinian prisoner. Where is the rest of the legal community in Israel, or, Heaven forbid, the rest of the world?
OHCHR condemned this week’s attacks as abhorrent and said they reflected a wider pattern of increased...
Two Israeli soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian detainee were met with cheers as they arrived...
