world news
Did guards commit sodomy against detainee at Sdei Teiman? – analysis
There are all kinds of side political and operational issues surrounding the arrest of 10 soldiers who were prison guards at the IDF’s makeshift Sdei Teiman detention facility for allegedly sodomizing a Palestinian detainee there.
But the central question is: did the guards sodomize the detainee or not? If they did, putting aside how much Israelis of all political affiliations despise any Palestinians involved in violence or terror against Israel, both Israeli and international law are very clear that the guards will need to be punished.
What the punishment would be depends on what they are convicted of, and there are all kinds of extenuating circumstances that can be explored in a trial that can lessen the severity of a crime or a sentence.
Hebron shooter Elor Azaria was convicted of a reduced manslaughter charge and ended up serving less than a year in prison for killing a neutralized Palestinian terrorist.The second most important question is whether the High Court of Justice will soon force a complete closure of the Sdei Teiman facility, or whether they will allow it to remain open in a reduced capacity, given that the vast majority of detainees have already been transferred to more standard prison facilities.
Back to the first main issue: there have been contrary reports about what the medical reports say regarding the detainee. Some reports have said that the medical reports unequivocally support the allegations that he was sodomized via his rectum. Other reports have said that the medical reports on that specific allegation leave open the possibility of him having been sodomized, but also leave open other possibilities that could be used by the suspects to argue the evidence cannot support a beyond a reasonable doubt conviction.
Prosecution confident of winning
The Jerusalem Post understands that the prosecution is very confident of winning on this point and, to date, the IDF pretrial court has consistently ruled in their favor to repeatedly extend the detention of the key suspects.
Another area of ambiguity is who is responsible for what. Ten guards were originally arrested. Two were quickly released, and three more were released some days later after their detention was initially extended by an IDF pretrial court.
It seems that those three may still face some lesser charges. Regarding the five still in detention, it seems that two may have central culpability for the alleged offenses, while the others may have some additional culpability beyond the earlier released arrested guards, but still less than the top two. The Post has learned, however, that all five are likely to be accused of being involved in some way with the sodomy attack.
Also, there have been leaks that the two central suspects failed polygraph questions about whether they had perpetrated sodomy. This is not a good sign for them, but polygraphs are also not considered strong evidence in criminal trials. The Post understands that this is more being used by prosecutors as a helpful guide point for how to conduct the pre-indictment investigation than any expectation of using the polygraph to win at trial.
Self-defense incidents don’t usually last 10 minutes
Possibly the largest problem for the two most central suspects and the three other suspects still under arrest are leaks that the central incident lasted for around 10 minutes.
If this is true, it will be very difficult for them to argue that they were acting in self-defense or that they were temporarily confused or provoked and did not have criminal intent.
A short 45-second video leaked to Channel 12 seemed to present the actions against the detainee as carefully planned, including concealing the worst actions from video cameras in the area, though because the actions were concealed, they do not necessarily prove the sodomy charge on their own.
But by putting together the video evidence with medical report evidence and possibly with some incriminating evidence from the prison guards themselves or their commanders, the case so far looks strong.
Certainly, the IDF pretrial court has made increasingly definitive statements about the evidence against the main suspects in the case.
The sodomy case is far from the only case relating to Sdei Teiman.
Already weeks ago, a separate indictment was filed against a single prison guard for beating a different detainee while transferring the detainee to and from the interrogation rooms.
In that case, there is video evidence of the beatings, and the soldier’s commanders turned him in.
Further, there are expected to be much later cases against prison guards relating to the deaths of around 27 detainees while in custody.
On July 19, the Post exclusively reported that IDF Military Advocate General Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi would point out that two complications with trying to speed up the Sdei Teiman cases are that some detainees were badly wounded on the battlefield and died in Sdei Teiman, but likely of their wounds.
She hopes she can move forward faster in cases of detainees who came to Sdei Teiman fully healthy and only later were wounded or died.
Delays in medical evaluations
However, even with those cases, the Post reported that the IDF legal division is facing a massive delay in receiving professional medical opinions regarding injuries or the cause of death.
For example, was death caused for a specific detainee by strangulation, a series of blows to the body, or a heart attack?
The Post reported that the state medical forensics institute has been overwhelmed in trying to advance all of these questions since October 7 and the depressing and unprecedented volume of work has decimated the staff size just as the IDF legal division is growing to try to keep up with the war.
As an example of delay, regarding one soldier who committed suicide, it took around seven to eight months to get a medical opinion.
The Post clarified on Thursday that despite the additional public attention now focused on the Sdei Teiman cases, there has been no breakthrough to move the forensics institute process faster as compared to where things stood at the time of the Post’s July 19 report.
Returning to the broader issue of how long Sdei Teiman will remain open, the state reported to the High Coirt of Justice on Wednesday that only around 30 detainees remain at the facility out of around 1,400 which were being held there prior to June 5.
Already on June 5, the state had told the court that 700 detainees had been transferred and that another 500 would be transferred within a few weeks.
Despite the progress, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel continued to push the court to order an immediate shut down of the facility.
ACRI contended that the state’s own comments on Wednesday made it clear that new detainees could still be brought to Sdei Teiman.
Further, ACRI said that the allegations of detainees being held there on their knees in crowded cages, handcuffed and blindfolded all day, and subject to humiliating treatment, along with the many cases turning into criminal probes, meant that the state should no longer be given the benefit of the doubt.
In contrast, the justices seemed to want to give the state credit for transferring the vast majority of detainees and wanted to give the state until early September, when the state said more remaining detainees would be transferred and the facility might be able to be closed.
The High Court did not clarify whether it would issue an order before early September.
Some police officials have accused the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) of withholding security threat information overnight between October 6 and 7, which, if it had been shared with the police, could have saved the lives of 364 civilians who were killed at the Nova party and the 44 hostages who were taken.
First reported by Channel 12 at the end of the weekend, the Acting Police Commander for the Negev Area in the South Eyal Azulai is quoted as saying that the police had always been unsure about the safety of the Nova party attendees and that if they had known about the enhanced security threat, they might have ended the party before the invasion took place.
The warnings that Azulai was referring to led to at least two consultations among and between the Shin Bet and the IDF in the middle of the night between October 6 and 7.
It appears that an aspect of these warnings were IDF intelligence seeing somewhere between dozens to hundreds of Israeli SIM cellphone cards switching on within Gaza, something drawing suspicion of a potential attempted penetration into Israel since Israelis cannot safely reside in Gaza.The various warnings eventually led to a decisive conference call between IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet Chief Ronen Bar, and other senior IDF officials in which the Shin Bet decided to send a small additional crew of reinforcements to the border, and all of the security officials agreed to discuss the situation more the next day.
However, either because the security chiefs did not view the threat as terribly significant or because they did not want to widen the circle of intelligence sharing to the police, who they might have trusted less with such sensitive information, they did not even tell the police that anything problematic was afoot.
Asked to respond to the allegations, the IDF gave a generic non-denial denial, saying only that it is still probing the Nova party incident and that it will present its findings to the public when it concludes the probe.
However, given that the IDF had originally said it would publish the probe in June and then sometime over the course of July and August, IDF and police officials have been now regularly leaking findings from all of the different military probes in order to try to frame the public’s view of them before the official reports are issued.
In the past, certain IDF officials have tried to blame the police for allowing the Nova party to go forward in such a secure area and for reacting slowly to save the Nova party attendees, given that technically, it had more direct responsibility for their safety than for the many Gaza border towns which Hamas invaded and which were supposed to be protected by the IDF.
This latest leak places the onus on the IDF and the Shin Bet (which has been even more opaque than the IDF, not providing a single public update to date about its October 7 failures) for failing to warn the police of the increased danger they knew about overnight between October 6 and 7.
No Israeli official had any idea of the scale of Hamas’s invasion
Even though no one in the IDF or the Shin Bet had any idea of the scale of the size of the impending invasion, even a warning of a small penetration, which they were worried about, might have been enough to get the police to close the Nova party and evacuate the attendees.
Next, the Channel 12 report tries to compliment the police for evacuating a significant percentage of the Nova party attendees once Hamas’s invasion started, as well as for setting up a defense position on Route 232, which slowed Hamas’s advance against some of the attendees.
However, the report also said that then-Israel Police chief Kobi Shabtai did not even call Halevi for more help until 11:45 a.m., by which time it was already too late to save many of the Nova party residents.
Also, at that point, neither Halevi nor Shabtai made any bold moves to send a larger amount of reinforcement forces rapidly to the Nova party despite the fact that there were far more civilians there than in the many other locations that Hamas was invading.
As has become clear by a variety of IDF briefings, top IDF officials were either still in shock or lacked a clear picture of myriad places where Hamas had invaded and did not even assign field commanders to certain areas until around 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, and full reinforcement forces did not arrive in some places until even later.
By then, the entire police position at Route 232 had been overrun, and most Nova party civilians who had stayed near police were either killed or kidnapped.
There is an ongoing unresolved disagreement between the IDF and the police about which side had more doubts about holding the Nova party and which side was more negligent in allowing it to go forward in such a dangerous area so close to Gaza in the first place.
A variety of IDF officials have said they had not even been updated by other IDF officials that the party was taking place.
Yet, IDF Southern Command Chief of Staff Brig.-Gen. Manor Yanai had told Azulai that there was no security issue with the Nova party, and despite that statement, did not later update Azulai or any other police officials that the situation had changed, according to Channel 12.
The lack of updates to the police from ]IDF Southern Command would stand even more since IDF Southern Commander Maj.-Gen. Yaron Finkleman, Yanai’s boss, abandoned his vacation in northern Israel in the middle of the night to rush south to his base at Beersheba to have a closer hand on the situation.
Everyone wants the Mossad on their side when it comes to the debate over the Philadelphi Corridor.
The Jerusalem Post has reported multiple times since May that the unchanging position of the Mossad is that Israel can and should withdraw from the corridor if that would bring back between 18-30 hostages and provided Phase 1 of the hostage deal with Hamas would allow the IDF to return to attacking Hamas in the corridor after around 45 days.
The Post and other outlets have also reported that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the IDF high command favor a deal under such terms, including temporarily withdrawing from the corridor to get some of the hostages back.
Yet on Sunday, an anonymous source who was present during the most recent diplomatic-security cabinet meeting leaked to the media that Mossad Director David Barnea supported Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position not to withdraw from the corridor.In fact, the anonymous source went even further saying that Barnea did not think Netanyahu should move toward Hamas on the issue “even one millimeter.”
Although… actually, that is not what the anonymous source said if the leaked statement is looked at carefully. Rather, it made a messy and hazy statement about Barnea supporting the Israeli position on the corridor to the extent that it would be acceptable to the US.Anyone who has followed the US position knows that it wishes Israel had stopped the war in December-January and for sure by May, and has tried everything it could to pressure Netanyahu to withdraw from the corridor.
Now, once the US said it could not get Netanyahu to completely withdraw from the corridor, it started to explore if it could get Hamas and Egypt to agree to a small Israeli presence in portions of the corridor, while otherwise generally withdrawing. That is not the same thing as thinking that Netanyahu’s stance on the corridor is the right move.The Mossad is in a somewhat similar position.
Mossad’s current position
There are some points where the Mossad’s position is tougher than the US position, but generally, since May, Barnea has been closer to the US, IDF, and Gallant’s view that it is time to cut a deal, even temporarily sacrificing control of the corridor, than he has been to Netanyahu’s staunch opposition to concessions in that area.
Also, usually, when the Mossad puts something out backing Netanyahu in negotiations, it is in its own name, not in the name of some anonymous cabinet official.The absence of a direct statement of support for Netanyahu from the Mossad itself is deafening.
So why is someone (from Netanyahu’s side) trying to pretend that the Mossad stands with the prime minister on this? Bodies of six hostages, who had been alive until last week, were just recovered.Netanyahu is under the greatest domestic pressure in Israel to compromise that he has been under possibly since the start of the war.
As he explains his position to the public, if he can claim that the defense establishment is split – IDF versus the Mossad – then he does not stand alone. His position looks principled and part of a serious strategy instead of about politics. Likewise, Gallant and the IDF want the Mossad on their side so they can present a united professionals’ front versus a political front. The truth is even without the Mossad, there is some principled opposition to cutting a deal if the question is saving the most Jewish lives on a long-term basis by ensuring Hamas is destroyed. But this also requires saying out loud that Netanyahu would be willing to let hostages die as a price to achieve that goal – because that is what happened this past week. Netanyahu is not ready to do this, so instead he would prefer if the battle can be about who supports who and a divide within the defense establishment.However, the more hostages die, there also becomes less incentive for a deal to save the shrinking total number of them still alive.
Whatever the Mossad’s view is, there is no question at this point that Netanyahu is the decider about the question of saving hostages versus keeping the corridor.
World soccer’s governing body FIFA has delayed again its decision on a Palestinian bid to have Israel suspended from international soccer over the war in Gaza.
FIFA said late on Friday it would now consider the Palestine Football Association’s (PFA) proposals against the Israel Football Association (IFA) in October.
The PFA had submitted a proposal to suspend Israel in May, with FIFA ordering an urgent legal evaluation and promising to address it at an extraordinary meeting of its council in July.
FIFA said last month the legal assessment would now be shared with its council by Aug. 31.The Zurich-based body said it had now moved the assessment back to October.
“FIFA has received the independent legal assessment of the Palestine Football Association’s proposals against Israel,” FIFA said.
“This assessment will be sent to the FIFA Council to review in order that the subject can be discussed at its next meeting which will take place in October.”
FIFA declined to give further details of the assessment, or when in October the meeting would take place.
The PFA did not respond to requests for comment.
Accusations against the IFA
The Palestinian proposal accuses the IFA of complicity in violations of international law by the Israeli government, discrimination against Arab players, and inclusion in its league of clubs located in Palestinian territory.
The IFA has rejected the allegations.
The PFA has said at least 92 Palestinian players have been killed in the war, football infrastructure has been destroyed, its leagues suspended and its national team required to play World Cup qualifiers abroad.
In its proposal, the PFA wanted FIFA to adopt “appropriate sanctions” against Israeli teams, including the national side and clubs.
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