Israel's High Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that the state's own prosecutors may investigate the leak of the Sde Teiman prison-abuse video, rejecting Justice Minister Yariv Levin's effort to remove them from the case. The vote was 2 to 1. In practical terms, State Attorney Amit Aisman may proceed [1].
Sde Teiman is a military detention facility north of Beersheba that holds Palestinian security detainees [2]. The affair at its center began on July 5, 2024, when a detainee was hospitalized with broken ribs and a tear in his rectal wall after allegedly being beaten and assaulted by IDF reservists from a Military Police reserve unit, per the Times of Israel's timeline of the case [2]. Security-camera footage published on August 6, 2024 purportedly showed the assault [2]. These are allegations the Israeli legal system itself has taken up: on February 19, 2025, five reservists were indicted on charges of causing severe injury and assault under aggravated circumstances [2]. The detainee was released to Gaza on October 13, 2025, under a ceasefire deal, before any trial concluded [2].
The case the High Court ruled on Wednesday is not the abuse case but the leak of the video. The footage's source was Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, then the military advocate general, who admitted approving the leak and resigned on October 31, 2025, saying she did so "in an attempt to counter the false propaganda directed against the military law enforcement authorities" [2]. She was arrested on November 2 and arraigned the next day on charges of obstruction of justice, fraud and breach of trust, and abuse of office [2]. Aisman is expected to file indictments against Tomer-Yerushalmi and other senior military prosecutors suspected of leaking the video and concealing the leak [1].
Levin's bid to remove the state prosecution rested on a conflict-of-interest claim against Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, whose office had overseen an internal probe that recommended against opening a criminal investigation into the leak's source [1]. Levin argued that connection disqualified her office and sought to install an outside official to run the investigation instead [1]. The court had previously allowed him to nominate an external investigator, then rejected both of his nominees as failing to meet the justices' guidelines [1]. Wednesday's 2-1 ruling closes that route: the prosecutors keep the file.
The split is part of the story. A 2-1 decision means one of the three justices would have ruled for Levin, and the majority holds by a single vote. The Times of Israel's liveblog reported the outcome without the justices' names or their reasoning, so the substance of the majority opinion and of the dissent is not yet in the record this desk could verify [1]. What the ruling establishes is narrow and real: the elected official who oversees the courts tried to take a leak investigation away from the professional prosecutors, and the professional prosecutors keep it, by the closest possible margin.
This desk reported on Monday on accountability inside Israel's own system from the other direction, the military's own published accounting of its October 7 manhunt. Wednesday's ruling is accountability of a different kind, contested rather than volunteered: a prison-abuse video that led to five soldiers' indictment, a leak that led to a former top military lawyer's arrest, and a fight over who investigates the leak that reached the High Court and split it. No one has been convicted in either the abuse case or the leak case; both remain at the indictment or investigation stage. What Wednesday settled is only who holds the file. That the answer required a 2-1 ruling against the justice minister is itself a measure of how contested the question had become.
