Israeli Troops Held for Questioning in Prisoner Abuse Investigation
Later, videos emerged showing protesters who had forced their way into the Beit Lid base, where Israel’s military courts and military police are headquartered, and where the reservists were taken for questioning. Some broke into the court building at Beit Lid.
The confrontation underscored how emboldened Israel’s far right has become. Among the protesters at Sde Teiman was at least one far-right lawmaker, Zvi Sukkot of the Religious Zionist Party, who could be seen in one video squeezing into the base through a gate as a uniformed man tried to push him back. And Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party, said soldiers must not be arrested like “criminals.”
“I’m calling on the chief military prosecutor, get your hands off the reservists,” Mr. Smotrich wrote on X.
But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a different tone in a brief statement, calling for calm at Sde Teiman and saying that he “strongly condemns the break-in.”
Military leaders and the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, emphasized the need to maintain law and order.
“Even in difficult times, the law applies to everyone,” Mr. Gallant said in a statement. “Nobody may trespass into I.D.F. bases or violate the laws of the State of Israel,” he added, using the abbreviation for the Israeli Defense Forces.
Sde Teiman is where the vast majority of detainees from Gaza have been interrogated or housed since the war began. Detention practices there have drawn repeated accusations that Israel is mistreating and abusing Palestinian prisoners.
Some in Israel said the protest and break-in added weight to allegations that Israeli forces had little regard for the law when it came to detainees from Gaza, who include people later determined to have no ties to Hamas or other armed groups. In interviews, former detainees at Sde Teiman have described beatings and other physical abuse.
Soldiers at the base “were acting outside any law — first in their treatment of detainees, and now toward military law enforcement agents,” the Public Committee Against Torture, an Israeli human rights group, said in a statement. Far-right leaders’ support for the detained reservists, they added, is “emblematic of the root causes that enable such abuse to happen in the first place.”
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo, and Johnatan Reiss from Tel Aviv and Gabby Sobelman from Jerusalem.
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