5 IDF reservists indicted for severe abuse of Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman
Indictment says soldiers broke prisoner’s ribs, caused internal tear in his rectum during assault at detention facility in July
Military prosecutors on Wednesday filed an indictment against five reserve soldiers for severely abusing a Palestinian detainee at the Israel Defense Forces’ Sde Teiman detention facility in southern Israel last summer.
The high-profile investigation into the abuse caused outrage among coalition politicians, government ministers, and right-wing activists. When the reservists were detained on July 29, 2024, dozens broke into the detention facility and another army base in an attempt to thwart the arrests.
According to the indictment, the five soldiers severely beat and assaulted the prisoner after he was brought to the detention facility on July 5, 2024, leaving him with severe injuries, including broken ribs and an internal tear in his rectum.
The IDF said the indictment was based on a Military Police investigation, including “extensive medical records and authentic visual documentation from the security cameras in the detention facility.” (Leaked footage aired by Channel 12 news in August purported to show the abuse.)
The five soldiers — a team commander, a security guard, an interpreter, and two others — were members of “Force 100,” a Military Police reserve unit tasked with guarding terror suspects at the Sde Teiman base. Two were officers with the ranks of major and captain, and the other three were a sergeant major, a sergeant first class and a corporal.
The five were tasked with searching detainees.
Alongside the five accused reservists was a group of three soldiers tasked with shielding those carrying out the searches from the other detainees held at the facility, using plastic riot shields. Another two soldiers were situated outside the detention area and were tasked with securing the site.
Initially, all 10 soldiers were detained, though prosecutors did not seek to hold the other five soldiers in custody.
According to the indictment, in afternoon of July 5, 2024, a group of Palestinian detainees was transferred from Ofer Prison in the West Bank — which is run by the Israel Prison Service — to the IDF’s Sde Teiman detention facility.
Among them was a prisoner whom the Force 100 team commander identified as “senior and new.” The indictment identifies the detainee only with the initials S. A. He was previously identified as a Hamas police officer.
At 10:26 p.m. that day, the Force 100 team searched one detainee, which lasted around a minute.
Right after, two of the accused reservists came to a mattress where S. A. was lying down, picked him up, and took him to a place where they would search him. The Palestinian detainee’s hands and legs were shackled and he had a blindfold over his eyes.
As the soldiers searched the detainee, the other reservists stood around him to create a barrier between them and the other detainees in the facility. The indictment said that at that moment, two of the accused held the detainee up against the wall by his shackled hands, then dropped him to the ground.
“For 15 minutes, the accused kicked the detainee, stomped on him, stood on his body, hit him and pushed him all over his body, including with clubs, dragged his body along the ground, and used a taser gun on him, including on his head,” the indictment alleged.
During the assault, the blindfold came off the detainee, and moments later one of the soldiers “stabbed the detainee in his buttock with a sharp object” close to his anus, which caused an internal tear in his rectal wall.
The indictment said the detainee cried in pain during the assault.
The reservists then took the detainee back to his mattress, hiding his bleeding using his shirt. Only an hour later after the detainee complained about difficulty breathing and a headache, detention facility officials noticed that he was bleeding heavily, and he was taken to a hospital.
The detainee suffered multiple traumatic wounds as a result of the beating, including seven broken ribs, a punctured lung, a tear in his rectum, and injuries all over his body, the indictment said.
He required surgery to his large intestine and a stoma was fitted as a result of the intestinal injury, which was removed three months later.
The soldiers are indicted on charges of causing severe injury and assault under aggravated circumstances, and not aggravated sodomy (a charge equivalent to rape), which Military Police investigators initially suspected.
The names of the accused were redacted in the indictment, as was the name of the prosecutor.
The military said in a statement that “IDF troops and commanders act in accordance with the law and IDF values, and unusual cases and suspicion of criminal activity are treated in accordance with the law.”
The reservists were arrested by masked Military Police detectives at the Sde Teiman base in southern Israel on July 29. After the arrests, a mob of far-right activists and lawmakers broke into the base and demonstrated, and later stormed the Beit Lid base where the suspects were being held and questioned.
The military opened a detention facility at a base located in Sde Teiman in southern Israel, amid an influx in Palestinian detainees as the war in Gaza proceeded, to hold Gazans suspected of terror activities. Various reports have alleged widespread misconduct and abuse at the site, including extreme use of physical restraints, beatings, neglect of medical problems, arbitrary punishments and more.
This led the army to launch a number of investigations related to incidents at the facility. Earlier this month, an IDF reservist who served as a guard at Sde Teiman during the war in Gaza was sentenced to seven months in jail for abusing Palestinian detainees, as part of a plea deal, in a separate case.
Throughout the Israel-Hamas war, Sde Teiman has been used to hold more than 1,000 detainees from Gaza who were suspected of terrorist activity. Many were suspected of taking part in Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, in which terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, though some were arrested during the subsequent IDF campaign in Gaza.
A petition was filed last year to the High Court of Justice demanding the facility be shut down amid the accusations. In a ruling in September 2024, the court warned the state that it must abide by the law, but did not order the government to shut the prison down.
The court noted in its final decision that conditions at Sde Teiman had changed significantly since the motion was filed. Amid the legal pressure, the government vastly reduced the number of detainees held at the facility from some 700 at its peak to several dozen as of the end of August.
The government also told the court in a written submission that it had reduced the use of restraints, and was providing food and medical treatment in accordance with the requirements of the law.
