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The British government has maintained silence over Israel’s recent arrest of Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi. But why?
If you’re wondering who she is, she’s the woman who was brave enough to leak a video which showed Israeli reservist soldiers abusing a Palestinian detainee. But, she isn’t the story.
According to Al Jazeera, Tomer-Yerushalmi was detained earlier this month after admitting that her office leaked footage of a Palestinian detainee suffering ‘severe violence, including stabbing the detainee’s bottom with a sharp object, which had penetrated near the detainee’s rectum’.
The Israeli soldiers present in the clip stand with their shields deliberately positioned to block the rape carried out by other members of the IDF behind them. Never has complicity been more undeniable. These violent acts also ‘caused severe physical injury to the detainee, including cracked ribs, a punctured lung, and an inner rectal tear’.
As only the second woman ever to reach such a high military position in the IDF, Tomer-Yeushalmi was known for her work around gender equality, ethics, and war conduct. Previously she helped establish the ‘Metsapim’ centre which supports parenthood during service.
Yet, apart from the Israeli military apparently filing charges against the perpetrators of this attack, nothing more has been done. Tomer-Yerushalmi’s actions have been decried as a ‘public relations attack’ by Netenyahu himself, she’s been suspended from her position, and she’s being considered a threat to Israel’s security.
It’s undoubtedly a strange reaction to an exposure of a military increasingly linked to inhumane acts in direct violation of international law, but that’s the stance regardless.
Everything is correct except that she’s not really a whistleblower. She was only trying to protect herself and Israel’s image. The only reason this “investigation” exists in the first place is to serve as a fig leaf for Israel, to make it look like it actually has an impartial… https://t.co/kMPz3lTk2m
— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) November 2, 2025
That’s not to say that there isn’t power in the collective defiance and opposition of heinous war crimes. Tomer-Yerushalmi’s arrest has created ‘a political and legal storm in Israel’. She’s even been heralded by some online commenters as a radical left wing hero.
Yet, as Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh suggested, arguably the focus on Tomer-Yerushalmi’s arrest was a deliberate tactic by Israeli media to ‘shift attention from the fact that these crimes are happening, by focusing on this woman and the fact that she leaked the video.’
While she may have done the ethical thing in this situation, in her letter of resignation released by The Times of Israel, she made clear that her duty is with the IDF – ultimately going on to justify Israel’s war on Palestine.
She also condemned ‘those detained at Sde Teiman (where the assault took place) as terrorists and terror operatives of the worst kind.’ Her justification for leaking the footage, then, was rooted not in any sense of remorse for the destruction caused by the IDF but in her belief that ‘there are things that cannot be done even against the worst of the detainees.’
The only information released about the detainee has been news of his return to Gaza as part of an exchange deal with Hamas, according to the BBC. Therefore, it’s impossible to judge his moral character in terms of where he stands on the scale of best to ‘worst’ detainees, or indeed what kind of ethical scale Tomer-Yerushalmi is working from.
