Police question MK Zvi Sukkot over Sde Teiman base break-in

Religious Zionism MK Zvi Sukkot was questioned under caution by police on  Tuesday over his role in last year’s break-in to the IDF’s Sde Teiman military base.

Sukkot was summoned in October by the Southern District police’s fraud division and agreed to present himself to investigators.

The far-right lawmaker was among a mob that rioted outside the base in July 2024, demanding Military Police release the soldiers they had arrested on suspicion of severely abusing a Gazan detainee held there. Five IDF reservists were indicted earlier this year over the alleged abuse.

Upon arrival at the station in Beersheba on Tuesday, Sukkot railed against his interrogation, calling it a political stunt to distract attention from police’s other Sde Teiman-related probe — into the leaking of footage last year that was said to document the soldiers’ abuse.

The MK told reporters before heading in for questioning that the summons he received was an attempt by law enforcement to “obscure the crimes committed in the prosecutor’s office.”

He was referring to the leak probe, whose prime suspect is former military advocate general Maj. Gen Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, who confessed she passed the footage to the media.

“I came to Sde Teiman to defend our soldiers against a large and powerful system. I have said more than once that I would not have done so had I known civilians would enter the base,” he told the media. “But as an MK I am allowed to enter, and that is also the position of my lawyers.”

During the break-in, Sukkot was filmed pushing through the gates of the base despite IDF efforts to block his entrance.

He was accompanied by several other right-wing lawmakers including Likud MK Nissim Vaturi and Otzma Yehudit MK Amichai Eliyahu, who also entered the compound. Both Eliyahu and Vaturi have refused to show up for questioning.

Otzma Yehudit MK Almog Cohen also took part in the demonstration, but is not known to have broken into Sde Teiman. Later that month, right-wing rioters, some of them masked, broke into the Beit Lid base, where the suspected soldiers were being interrogated.

Upon leaving the station after his interrogation, Sukkot lambasted the police, accusing them of focusing on minor issues rather than combating drug trafficking and crime in the south.

“This is a completely absurd event. In the Southern District there are hundreds of drug dens, thousands of illegal weapons, and they can’t find a thing. They file one indictment every three years, but invest all their resources in interrogating an MK for an incident from a year and a half ago, just to serve political appointees,” he said, according to the Ynet news site.

Amid an influx of Palestinian detainees due to the Gaza war, the IDF opened a detention facility in southern Israel’s Sde Teiman base, where it held Gazans suspected of terror activities.

Various reports alleged widespread misconduct and abuse of detainees 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.

When Military Police arrived at Sde Teiman on July 29 to detain the soldiers in connection to an incident of alleged sexual abuse of a detainee, far-right politicians and activists rioted outside Sde Teiman and Beit Lid, demanding the reservists’ release.

Days after the break-in, Sukkot defended his actions in the Knesset, insisting that he had been doing his job and that he was permitted to enter “any place in the State of Israel” for the purpose of oversight.