Israeli soldier sentenced to 7 months in jail for abusing Palestinian detainees

This undated photo from winter 2023 provided by Breaking The Silence, a whistleblower group of former Israeli soldiers, shows Palestinian prisoners captured in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces at a detention facility on the Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel. (Breaking The Silence via AP)

JERUSALEM — An Israeli soldier who was found to have struck Palestinian detainees while they were restrained and blindfolded has been sentenced to seven months in jail by an Israeli military court.

The Israeli military on Thursday announced the court had accepted a plea agreement with the soldier, a reservist who it said admitted to having “severely abused” Palestinian detainees at the Sde Teiman military detention center near the border with the Gaza Strip.

“The defendant was convicted of several incidents in which he struck detainees with his fists and his weapon while they were bound and blindfolded,” the military said. It did not name the soldier or detail the charges he was convicted of.

The military statement did not identify where the Palestinian detainees were from, why they had been detained or whether they had since been charged or convicted of crimes or released from detention.

In addition to seven months imprisonment, the court handed the soldier a suspended sentence and demoted him to the rank of private. The military said the soldier had served as a security guard at the detention center but did not say what rank he had held. Israeli media reported the soldier’s jail sentence included time that he had already spent in detention.

The military court found that other masked soldiers had participated in the abuse but that their identities had not been determined, the military said, without saying how many.

The convicted soldier had beaten the detainees in front of other soldiers, some of whom had told him to stop, the military said, adding that a recording of the abuse had been found on the mobile phone of the convicted soldier.

The military has been investigating allegations that soldiers had abused Palestinians from Gaza held in military detention since the start of the war in October 2023. The military on Thursday did not say whether investigations were still ongoing or if any other soldiers had been charged.

In July last year, right-wing Israeli protesters broke into Sde Teiman detention facility and another Israeli military compound after investigators arrived to question soldiers about suspected abuse.

Sde Teiman was opened after the war started and held captured Palestinians from Gaza. Israel last year said it would close the facility.

(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell; Editing by Ros Russell)