Shany and Cohen on the end of the Sde Teiman case

Lawfare has published this sober (and sobering) review by Professors Yuval Shany and Amichai Cohen of the Sde Teiman affair in Israel. Excerpt:

While the MAG’s decision to withdraw the charges against the accused soldiers can perhaps be justified by the combined effect of the case’s evidentiary problems and the potential procedural consequences of the parallel prosecutorial misconduct investigation, the overall outcome of the case raises serious concerns. First, the withdrawal of the case, notwithstanding the extreme seriousness of the charges, creates a risk of impunity and indirectly endorsing the right-wing narrative of the “framing” of the Sde Teiman Five. The soft language in the decision concerning a “grave and troubling” sequence of events does not amount to a clear acknowledgment of unlawfulness of the soldiers’ conduct, nor an effective repudiation of the claim that the military legal system had wrongly framed them. The celebratory manner in which right-wing politicians and the right-wing media have received the decision is likely to reaffirm their “Israel-can-do-no-wrong” narrative, which, in turn, delegitimizes efforts to hold IDF service members accountable for crimes committed against Palestinians.

Second, although the decision refers to professional considerations, it’s impossible to ignore the severe political pressures surrounding the case—including political efforts to discredit the MAG Corps. The leak and cover-up scandal, which was an unwise and allegedly unlawful reaction to the political pressure, further weakened the corps, in a manner that calls into question their ability to conduct high-profile prosecutions against IDF service members. The underwhelming record, so far, of criminal investigations in connection with the Israel-Hamas war (according to IDF statistics published in May 2025, about 1,500 operational investigations and some 60 criminal investigations were opened—excluding investigations of looting—and two criminal prosecutions were filed) raises concerns as to whether the MAG is willing and able to conduct criminal cases in the face of an increasingly hostile political climate. Unless corrected through robust action in other pending investigations, this impression is likely to greatly complicate Israel’s efforts to claim complementary or subsidiarity before international and foreign criminal courts.

Finally, the decision confirms long-standing concerns about the contagious effects of rule-of-law deficiencies in the military justice system and the broader Israeli legal system. The Sde Teiman scandal started with a misuse of a detention facility because the minister of national security had intervened politically in the policy of detainee incarceration. It continued with the Supreme Court dragging its feet to hear the case, and with the Israeli government’s failure to facilitate international visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to the detention center.

The serious abuse of detainees in Sde Teiman was initially handled strongly by the military police, but the strong political backlash has pushed the military legal system into a tailspin, resulting in professional misconduct and a thwarted prosecution. Cumulatively, the whole affair marks a low point for the rule of law in Israel. In order to bounce back, the legal system, including the military legal system, should find a way to assert its authority vis-a-vis the political environment—a development that appears unlikely in today’s climate of increased hostility between the legal and political universes in Israel.