Israel Police Commissioner Daniel Levi announced last week the conclusion of the investigation into the “Sde Teiman leak,” a case centered on the unauthorized release of security footage from a detention facility for Hamas terrorists to the press.
In a move that departed from decades of legal procedure, Levi directed the police legal department to bypass the standard transfer of the case file to the attorney general or the State Attorney’s Office. The materials were instead rerouted to the legal adviser to the Ministry of Justice, Yael Kotik. The police justified the diversion by citing the need to maintain “public trust” and ensuring an objective review by an authority not embroiled in the case’s internal controversies.
Levi explained in a formal statement that the findings of the investigation by the police’s investigations and intelligence division, “given their sensitivity and the institutional linkages involved,” require a review by a senior professional authority “external to the current chain of command to ensure the absolute integrity of the legal process.”
The Sde Teiman case
The current standoff revolves around an August 2024 segment shown on the Channel 12 broadcaster in which leaked security footage from the Sde Teiman facility near Beersheva was aired. The video purportedly showed a group of IDF reservists surrounding a Palestinian detainee with riot shields to obscure him from surveillance cameras, during which time he allegedly suffered severe injuries and sexual violence.
The video had been used as supporting evidence for the investigation and subsequent arrest of the soldiers in July 2024. The broadcast intensified a national debate that had already turned violent when, on July 29, 2024, protesters and several coalition lawmakers stormed both the Sde Teiman base and the Beit Lid military camp to protest the detention of the soldiers.
In the immediate aftermath of the segment broadcast, an internal investigation was launched to identify the source of the unauthorized leak. This initial probe, conducted by the Military Advocate General’s (MAG) Office and overseen by the A.G., concluded in late 2024 without identifying a suspect.
However, the case took a dramatic turn in October 2025, when the MAG, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, submitted her resignation and admitted to authorizing the release of the footage. In her resignation letter, she sought to justify the decision as a response to political pressure and what she described as a “destructive campaign” against her office. Tomer-Yerushalmi wrote that she “approved the release of material to the media in an attempt to counter false propaganda against the army’s law enforcement authorities.”
A police investigation was immediately opened against Tomer-Yerushalmi. However, on Nov. 2, she was briefly reported missing at a Tel Aviv beach. She was later located and arrested by police on suspicion of breach of trust and obstruction of justice after it was discovered that she took the unsupervised hours she had on the beach to dispose of her phone in the ocean, attempting to deny police access to evidence relevant to the investigation.
The MAG’s admission shifted the political focus from the alleged assault in Sde Teiman to the institutional integrity of the military legal corps. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized the leak as “perhaps the most severe public relations attack that the State of Israel has experienced since its establishment.”
The legal process
The central tension in the Sde Teiman investigation lies in the “institutional conflict of interest” involving the Attorney General’s Office. Justice Minister Yariv Levin and coalition members argued that because Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara had overseen the initial internal probe into the leak, which concluded without identifying Tomer-Yerushalmi as the leaker, her office could not objectively manage the subsequent criminal investigation into that same failure.
This argument gained significant legal weight in November, following a formal opinion issued by Kotik, who determined that the involvement of senior legal officials in earlier stages of the affair necessitated a transfer of oversight.
In her letter outlining the conflict, Kotik wrote that “at this stage, the A.G. must refrain from participating in the oversight and supervision of the ongoing investigation ..., solely intended to ensure the independence of the investigation, even in terms of public perception.” Baharav-Miara announced her recusal from the probe following Kotik’s letter.
The conflict extended beyond the attorney general herself as Kotik’s opinion encompassed several of Baharav-Miara’s top deputies. Several high-ranking officials within the state prosecution, including senior assistant Hagai Harosh and Deputy State Attorney Alon Altman, chose to recuse themselves and were asked to provide testimony to police investigators.
Deputy Military Advocate General Brig. Gen. Gal Asael, who led the failed initial probe, testified that he had acted in coordination with the Attorney General’s Office throughout the process, further complicating the institutional separation required for a criminal investigation.
Despite all these entanglements, Baharav-Miara was never questioned.
Yaakov Ben-Shemesh, a constitutional law scholar at Ono Academic College in Kiryat Ono, near Tel Aviv, said that not questioning Baharav-Miara constituted a glaring omission in the investigation.
“The A.G. was never questioned, so clearly, she’s not implicated as far as the police are concerned. However, in my view, it’s rather bizarre that they never asked her to give her side of the story, considering that she was deeply involved in the initial investigation,” Ben-Shemesh told JNS. “It doesn’t mean that she’s necessarily a suspect, but she is definitely important to make sense of this whole story,” he added.
Despite the police eventually clearing Baharav-Miara of personal involvement in the leak, the Justice Ministry maintained its stance that the entire hierarchy of the state prosecution remained conflicted. This created a unique legal deadlock where the police had completed its work, but the body typically responsible for filing indictments, the State Attorney’s Office, was viewed by the Ministry of Justice as disqualified from handling the evidence.
Between November and December 2025, Justice Minister Levin launched multiple attempts to establish an independent oversight mechanism for the Sde Teiman investigation, arguing that the traditional legal hierarchy was incapable of impartial self-scrutiny. In mid-November, the Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, issued a landmark ruling acknowledging that “irregular and extreme circumstances” justified a supervisor from outside the standard prosecution agencies.
However, in the same ruling, the court annulled Levin’s first choice, State Ombudsman for Judges Asher Kula. The court ruled that statutory restrictions prohibited the ombudsman from assuming additional roles.
Levin’s subsequent nomination of retired District Court judge Joseph Ben-Hamo was similarly struck down in early December. The three-justice panel, composed of Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and Justices Yael Willner and Khaled Kabub, held that Ben-Hamo did not meet the court’s requirement of being a serving senior public official. Willner emphasized that appointing an individual from outside the civil service exclusively for this role “inherently increases the concern that extraneous political considerations underlie the appointment.”
By mid-December, Levin informed the court that his search had reached a “dead end,” claiming that eligible senior civil servants with the necessary legal expertise were either tied to the Attorney General’s Office or unwilling to accept the position under such convoluted conditions.
Following a final rejection of his request to reconsider Kula on Dec. 23, Levin issued a sharp critique of the judicial interference, saying, “This is the look of a system that has lost all shame, that knows it stinks of corruption and double standards, and that is desperately clinging to its power and authority even at the cost of a complete loss of public trust in it and its leaders.”
The court responded by suggesting that if the justice minister remained unable to identify a suitable candidate, he should petition the court to appoint a supervisor on his behalf. This procedural stalemate left the investigation without an official overseer for several weeks.
The police decision
Following the collapse of the effort to appoint an ad hoc external supervisor, the Israel Police leveraged the existing role of the Justice Ministry’s legal adviser to break the procedural deadlock. Police Legal Adviser Elazar Kahana ultimately made the decision that Kotik was the most procedurally correct authority for the police to work with.
“The police commissioner had no clear path to follow because there was no person designated to receive the evidence,” Ben-Shemesh explained. “Kotik is a sort of middle ground because she’s in the legal adviser system, but she is in the Justice Ministry and has personal affiliations that make her friendlier to the government. However, she’s not clearly identified with one side or the other.”
The police did not transfer the entire evidence file to Kotik initially, but rather a “factual situation report” summarizing the findings of the investigation into the Military Advocate General’s Office and the State Attorney’s Office’s potential conflict of interest.
Kahana’s letter argued that because the investigation had cleared the attorney general of personal involvement in the leak, the ministry should reconsider the institutional restrictions previously imposed on her office.
Kotik responded to Kahana by declining to revisit the conflict-of-interest status of the Attorney General’s Office until she (Kotik) received a more comprehensive briefing on the testimonies provided by state prosecution staff. Kotik maintained that the mere act of high-ranking officials giving testimony confirmed the persistent nature of the conflict, explaining that “a complete factual basis is required to allow for the examination of the conflict-of-interest issue. Once you provide us with the necessary information, we will be able to reassess our position regarding the individual and institutional conflict of interest.”
The legal argument
The standoff between the Israel Police and the Attorney General’s Office has centered on a fundamental clash of legal principles. Critics of the police’s decision argue that the move undermines the “unity of the prosecution,” a core doctrine of Israeli law established in the laws defining the role of the government legal adviser. (The attorney general’s title in Hebrew is actually “the legal adviser to the government.”)
This principle dictates that the attorney general serves as the final arbiter for all criminal indictments in cases of national significance. Opponents of the reroute, including the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, contend that bypassing the State Attorney’s Office creates a “shadow legal system” that could be exploited for political purposes.
Conversely, the legal justification for the police’s departure from protocol rests on the principle of “substantial justice,” the idea that a legal official cannot oversee a case in which his or her own office or close associates are implicated. Proponents of this view argue that the standard of recusal required for a judge or a low-level prosecutor must also apply to the highest echelons of the Justice Ministry.
The police legal department has defended its actions by pointing to the High Court’s Nov. 16 ruling, which acknowledged that certain circumstances could necessitate moving a case away from the attorney general’s direct supervision. The legal debate currently hinges on whether the “holding pattern” created by transferring the file to Kotik constitutes a fulfillment of the court’s requirement or a circumvention of it.
While the Attorney General’s Office maintains that only the state prosecution can authorize a final indictment, the police argue that their independence as investigators would be compromised if they were compelled to hand evidence to an office that was indirectly a subject of the investigation.
Ben-Shemesh said that the police’s decision was not well-grounded legally. “I’m not sure what the legal basis for the decision is. She [Kotik] was not appointed by the justice minister to supervise the case; she was not appointed by a court; she was not appointed by anyone. This seems to be a sort of default decision, but it’s unclear what the basis for the decision is,” Ben-Shemesh said.
However, he added that the case was so extraordinary that it was unsurprising that some novel legal realities were emerging. “We are in such an exceptional and rare case that you can’t find precedents for these types of decisions. No one would have suspected that the entire legal system would be implicated in such a mess,” he concluded.
