Ex-IDF legal chief hospitalized after suicide attempt, police commissioner confirms

Former IDF military advocate general Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who was released to house arrest last week after being detained over the Sde Teiman video leak, was hospitalized on Sunday morning after medics were called to her home over what was later confirmed to have been a suicide attempt.

Tomer-Yerushalmi was released to 10-day house arrest on Friday, five days after she went missing on a beach and a week after she resigned from her post and admitted to leaking a surveillance video that purported to show troops severely abusing a Gazan detainee at the Sde Teiman detention facility in southern Israel last year.

Tomer-Yerushalmi was conscious when she was taken to the hospital from her Ramat Hasharon home, Hebrew-language media reports said, adding that her life was not thought to be in danger. It was later reported that she had overdosed on sleeping pills in an apparent suicide attempt.

Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov) confirmed that the former top military legal official had been admitted and was undergoing assessment.

On Sunday night, Police Commissioner Danny Levy confirmed that Tomer-Yerushalmi had been hospitalized following an attempt to end her own life.

“Her life isn’t rosy,” he said of the disgraced prosecutor, after a protester was detained outside of her home.

The police chief also addressed the allegations against Tomer-Yerushalmi, saying that “if she committed the offense, this affects how the army looks, how soldiers behave.”

“We send our kids to an organization where they should be sure that nobody is leaking things, and that’s why we’re probing it,” he added.

According to the Ynet news site, police are expected to ask the court to apply the conditions of her house arrest in the hospital as well, and to demand that her passport be confiscated to prevent her from fleeing the country.

An unnamed senior police official told Ynet that Tomer-Yerushalmi’s hospitalization has raised law enforcement’s concerns that she could attempt to obstruct the investigation into the leak.

Tomer-Yerushalmi is suspected of fraud and breach of trust, abuse of her office, obstruction of justice and unlawful disclosure of material over her role in the leak of the video.

She was arrested on November 2, after going missing off the coast at Hatzuk Beach near Tel Aviv for several hours, leading police to fear that she had taken her own life.

When she was eventually found in nearby Herzliya, law enforcement officials were unable to locate her phone, leading them to suspect that the incident was an attempt to stage a suicide or suicide attempt while disposing of digital evidence related to the leaking of the video and subsequent cover-up.

Law enforcement authorities and volunteers spent a number of days searching the Tel Aviv beachfronts and the ocean for her phone, suspecting that it holds incriminating evidence, even as Tomer-Yerushalmi reportedly continued to deny that she had staged the incident and insisted that she really had intended to end her life.

The search mission failed to yield results until Friday morning, when, shortly before Tomer-Yerushalmi’s release to house arrest, the phone was found in the sea at Hatzuk Beach north of Tel Aviv.

Cyber authorities on Saturday night confirmed that the phone was Tomer-Yerushalmi’s.

The Sde Teiman surveillance video was leaked to Channel 12 in August 2024, days after masked military police officers arrested nine reservists at the base suspected of taking part in the abuse of the Gazan detainee, who suffered from severe injuries, including to his rectum.

Tomer-Yerushalmi, who resigned last week after admitting she leaked the video, has said she did so to fend off public criticism that culminated in right-wing mobs irate over the soldiers’ detention — including coalition lawmakers — storming Sde Teiman and the Beit Lid military court, where the suspects were taken.

Five of the reservists were indicted in February, but the fate of their trial is unclear after it emerged last week that the abused detainee was released back to Gaza as part of the October 9 truce-hostage deal between Israel and Hamas.

Tomer-Yerushalmi told police over the past week that she had concealed her identity as the leaker, and that no one outside her office was involved in the leak or knew that she was behind it, the Kan public broadcaster reported Friday.