Israel drops indictment of five soldiers in Palestinian detainee abuse case

A man holds pictures of Reza Pahlavi, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump as people wave Iran’s pre-1979 revolution flag. Photo / Apu Gomes, AFP

The Israeli military has said it had dropped charges against five soldiers accused of abusing a Palestinian detainee at the high-security Sde Teiman prison, a case that had sparked widespread outrage.

“In light of significant developments since the filing of the indictment in the Sde Teiman case, the Military Advocate General decided today to order the cancellation of the indictment against the five defendants,” the military said.

In February 2025, the military announced that five reservists had been charged over the alleged abuse of a Palestinian detainee in July 2024 at the Sde Teiman detention centre near the Gaza Strip.

At the time, the army said the soldiers were accused of “acting against the detainee with severe violence, including stabbing the detainee’s buttocks with a sharp object, which had penetrated near the detainee’s rectum”.

Explaining the decision to drop the charges, the military said “procedural difficulties regarding the transfer of information” by Israeli police had “undermined the defendants’ right to a fair trial”.

Another factor cited was that the detainee had been returned to Gaza and was therefore unable to testify in the case.

The military said army chief Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir had called on personnel “to draw lessons” from the case to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

The case also involved the military advocate general, who resigned following suspicions that a video of the Sde Teiman incident had been leaked.

In her resignation letter, published in November 2025 by the media, the former military advocate general acknowledged that her office had distributed the video to the media.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed the decision.

“It is unacceptable that it took so long to close a case that was conducted in a criminal manner against IDF fighters who are confronting the worst of our enemies,” he said in a statement.

“The State of Israel must pursue its enemies, not its heroic fighters.”

The Sde Teiman detention centre was created to hold detainees from Gaza early in Israel’s war with Hamas, sparked after the Islamist group’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

Rights groups frequently accuse the Israeli prison authorities of mistreating Palestinian detainees.

- Agence France-Presse