Israel has dropped all charges against five soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee at a military detention facility, Israeli media outlets have reported, closing a case that became one of the most divisive in the country’s recent history.

The military announced the decision this week, more than a year after footage of the assault at Sde Teiman, a desert facility holding Palestinians detained during Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, was broadcast by Israeli television, triggering international outrage.

The incident, which occurred on July 5, 2024, resulted in the detainee being admitted to hospital. A doctor at the facility, Professor Yoel Donchin, told Israeli newspaper Haaretz he was so shocked by the man’s condition that he initially assumed it was the work of a rival armed group.

The military’s own indictment described soldiers stabbing the detainee with a sharp object near his rectum, causing cracked ribs, a punctured lung and an internal tear.

The US Department of State called the allegations “horrific” at the time and demanded a swift and full investigation. “There ought to be zero tolerance of any sexual abuse, rape, of any detainees, period,” then State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said.

Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the military’s top lawyer who had filed the indictment and authorised the footage to be leaked to Channel 12, resigned last year and was subsequently arrested on charges including fraud, breach of trust and obstruction of justice.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, described the leak of the video, not the incident itself, as perhaps the worst “public relations attack” Israel had ever faced.

Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the left-wing Hadash-Ta’al faction, previously told Al Jazeera, “They [the government] want to cover up the rape.”

“That’s why they’re dealing with the prosecutors and not the crime itself,” Touma-Suleiman said, adding, “This is how the judiciary works. These are your so-called checks and balances. Look at them, they’re criminals.”

The soldiers’ initial arrest in 2024 had prompted anger from members of Israel’s far-right government, some of whom physically stormed the Sde Teiman facility in protest.

The dropped charges are likely to heighten scrutiny of Israel’s accountability record, amid growing doubts over the independence of its legal system.

Israeli rights group B’Tselem has described the country’s detention system as a “network of torture camps”.

According to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, a human rights organisation, despite hundreds of reported alleged abuse cases since October 2023, Israeli authorities have brought indictments in only two incidents, with no prison service personnel charged.

A report by Israeli rights group Yesh Din found that 93.6 percent of investigations into ideologically motivated offences by Israelis against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since 2005 ended without indictment, a record it describes not as oversight, but as deliberate policy.

A sweeping UN Human Rights Office report published in January found that of more than 1,500 Palestinians killed between 2017 and September 2025, Israeli authorities opened 112 investigations and secured just one conviction.

Israel maintains that its forces act within Israeli military and international law and that it investigates alleged abuses thoroughly.

>>1496634
Weird they would drop the charges.
Under Jewish religious law this sort of thing is forbidden unless if the soldier kidnaps her and holds her captive for at least one month before raping her, at least that's what Deuteronomy 21:10 says

>>1496639
Abundantly clear the Israeli state isn’t actually Jewish and doesn’t follow any sacred law but I’m not Jewish so idk. The prisoners in question were male and they were sodomized by foreign objects so maybe that isn’t rape according to certain rabbis or whatever.

Heinrich Himmler exonerated guards at Auschwitz for treating prisoners badly

>>1496639
“When you go out to war against your enemies, and theLORDyour God delivers them into your hand, and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and desire her and would take her for your wife, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails. She shall put off the clothes of her captivity, remain in your house, and mourn her father and her mother a full month; after that you may go in to her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. And it shall be, if you have no delight in her, then you shall set her free, but you certainly shall not sell her for money; you shall not treat her brutally, because you have humbled her.

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>>1496634
rape is officially legal in Israel