Edelstein bashes ex-IDF legal chief for lying to Knesset panel over source of Sde Teiman video leak

Likud MK Yuli Edelstein asserts he “nearly cried” after hearing that former military advocate general Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi had been behind the Sde Teiman surveillance footage leak.

Speaking to Channel 12 in an interview, Edelstein says that he presided over three closed-door hearings in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on the leaking of surveillance footage purporting to show IDF soldiers abusing a Gazan detainee prior to his ouster as committee chairman.

Tomer-Yerushalmi last month resigned from her post as military advocate general and admitted she leaked the video.

Edelstein recalls meeting privately with the ex-IDF legal chief before one of the hearings.

“She sat in front of me, said that she respects the committee and respects me, but that she worried it would be a meeting full of yelling and screaming, and that she wants a businesslike hearing,” he says.

Edelstein says he promised Tomer-Yerushalmi such conditions, as she provides “businesslike answers” to the difficult questions bound to arise in the meeting.

“All that time she was sitting in front of me… and she’s brazenly lying to me,” he says. “It’s difficult even to conceive that a commander in the IDF would do something like this.”

He says that Tomer-Yerushalmi, while speaking to the committee, insisted that she did not know the source of the leak. He recounts the “terrible feeling” with him throughout the hearings. “I can’t remember that someone has ever tried to trick me in this way.”

He adds that he suspected at the time that Tomer-Yerushalmi was guilty of obstructing the investigation, but lacked hard proof.

He also says that he suspects Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara was involved in obstructing the investigation into the leak; however, she is not a suspect in the ongoing criminal probe into Tomer-Yerushalmi and her close circle.