IDF legal chief to issue key rulings on Gaza war crimes allegations in coming weeks - exclusive

IDF Military Advocate General Maj.-Gen. Itay Offir will issue multiple major decisions regarding Gaza war crimes allegations in the coming weeks, The Jerusalem Post has learned.Among these decisions, which will be the first that Offir will be publicizing relating to Gaza since he took office in November 2025, will be the April 2024 World Central Kitchen incident, the March 2025 Palestinian Red Crescent incident, and a few other high-profile incidents.In some ways, these will be Offir's opening move on his legal playing field with the world, having made some monumental decisions with mostly Israeli implications in recent months.One could call the IDF legal division's standing on the world stage a part of the third of his three circles in which he focuses his efforts, the Post understands.The first circle is within the IDF legal division itself.Offir has a tall order of rebuilding the confidence regarding the IDF legal division on multiple planes, but the first one is internal.When his predecessor, Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi, suddenly resigned in October 2025, along with some of her top staff, after admitting to illegally publicly leaking a video of evidence in the Sde Teiman saga case, morale in the IDF legal division was at an all-time low.Within the legal community and in the government more broadly, officials from the IDF legal division had always generally been viewed as highly talented and professional, and they end up rising to senior positions in large firms or to top posts in various government agencies.One of Offir's first jobs has been to rebuild that confidence.In order to do that, the Post has learned that soon after he took office, he set about meeting, over a series of weeks, with every single sub-unit of the sprawling IDF legal division, which has several hundred lawyers and even more other support staff on every border and in every sub-arm, such as the air force and navy.It was important to Offir to hear directly from the IDF's lawyers, in small enough groups that even junior lawyers would speak freely, what they needed in order to regain their swagger.His second circle is between the IDF legal division and the rest of the IDF.Here, Offir has a huge advantage.He already worked closely for two years with IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, when the two worked at the Defense Ministry.Put differently, he has already served as the top lawyer of an agency run by Zamir before.Just as Offir became one of Zamir's key close advisers, and not just a lawyer, at the Defense Ministry, during Operation Roaring Lion, the IDF MAG was by Zamir's side for most of the war.For 40 days, the Post understands that Offir relocated from his standard MAG office space to the underground "Pit" where Zamir managed the war day-to-day with himself and only a few other generals from the high command.Between those 40 days and Offir's numerous visits to the front in Gaza and Lebanon, IDF officers have remarked that the new MAG is much more comfortable in the field with commanders on the front than Tomer Yerushalmi was, and more than some other predecessors, though they too visited the fronts at times. In fact, Offir is unusual in that he served as a combat fighter in the Givati Brigade, something uncommon for most IDF MAGs.All of this also gave Offir more respect and influence in some of the recent Iran war decisions, such as clear directives to evacuate certain Iranian sites, which Israel had a legal right to attack, but which could lead to unpredictably high-profile collateral harm.The final circle is with the whole country and the world.Regarding this circle, one thing that is different about Offir from some prior MAGs is that if some of them would emphasize the slogan of Israel and the legal division needs to "win on all fronts," he would agree with that, but add that first, the IDF must win its kinetic wars.In other words, Offir is cognizant of the importance of IDF and Israeli legitimacy in the world, but he views his first job as facilitating the IDF to win battles – of course, always within the confines of Israeli law and the spirit of the IDF.This approach will probably find favor with some in Israel who, rightly or wrongly, have felt that the IDF legal division has sometimes held the military back too much from acting to win.Yet, none of this means that Offir will go soft on real legal issues.In fact, Offir may return some stricter order in various areas than the IDF atmosphere that took hold under Tomer Yerushalmi following the October 7 invasion.In Offir's view, following the IDF's senior officers' failure to prevent the Hamas invasion, many commanders felt they had lost the standing to rebuke their soldiers for smaller disciplinary screwups.It is public record that soldiers were swimming on Gaza's beach unauthorized in the early stages of the war and that a sizable number of lower-level officers ordered various Gaza buildings to be demolished without proper higher-up authorization.Offir has been acting and will continue to act to restore top-down discipline, both to ensure the law is followed and to help the IDF to return to being a more focused war-fighting machine where orders are followed and discipline is sacred. WCK, Palestinian Red Crescent high-profile alleged war crimes incidentsRegarding the WCK incident in which Israel mistakenly killed seven international aid workers, a fascinating twist is that Offir himself is not making the decision.In prior capacities as the Defense Ministry legal adviser, Offir apparently worked very closely with IDF Col. Nochi Mendel, a lead officer-suspect, on a number of projects.Although this does not necessarily technically disqualify him from rendering a decision under "conflict of interest" definitions the way it would if the two were family members, Offir did not feel like he could objectively judge Mendel, or at least wanted to remove even any perception of favoritism.For that reason, IDF Chief Prosecutor Col. Eli Levertov will be issuing the decision regarding WCK.Levertov became IDF chief prosecutor in August 2025, only around two months before Tomer-Yerushalmi's resignation.However, regarding the Palestinian Red Crescent case, in which the IDF mistakenly killed international aid workers, and a couple of other case decisions that will be issued, Offir's broader approach is clear.He will not look into these cases in a vacuum or from the perspective of a law school professor in an ivory tower.Rather, he will look at the cases from the perspective of the IDF having been engaged in a war to topple Hamas in Gaza as a response to a massive and monstrous invasion.He will also take note of all of Hamas's techniques of systematically using human shields and civilian locations throughout the Strip to fight the IDF, including using women and children with white flags to try to entrap and kill IDF soldiers.In other words, there will be a heavy burden of proof to meet before concluding that an IDF soldier who killed innocent Palestinians did so with deliberate intent, as opposed to by mistake in difficult circumstances and the gray fog of war.There may be indictments and punishments for harming or killing Palestinians, such as an incident in February where IDF soldiers were recorded beating an innocent Palestinian without any obvious cause, or an incident earlier this month in which IDF soldiers killed a Palestinian baby in a car.The Post understands that there are more than five additional incidents where IDF soldiers beat Palestinians in the West Bank and are being probed or prosecuted since Offir took office.One difference between Offir and other MAGs could be that he may make less of a public show in such cases, though Israel may decide, at the diplomatic level, to privately report them to international bodies like the International Court of Justice, so such bodies cannot claim that Israel does not prosecute its own.Why Offir dropped the Sde Teiman indictmentsOne mystery has been how Offir decided to withdraw the indictments against five IDF Force 100 prison guard soldiers in the large Sde Teiman case.The IDF MAG wrote a detailed decision explaining the two sides of the debate on the issue and why it ultimately decided to withdraw the indictments, while still not clearing the five soldiers of non-criminal wrongdoing.But there were key matters that he did not address in his public decision.For example, one reason he cited for withdrawing the indictment was that the Palestinian detainee whom the five soldiers were accused of beating had been sent back to Gaza.Without his testimony, the prosecution's case would be missing major gaps.But this detail in and of itself raises a much larger question: how on earth did the IDF prosecution allow a central witness to be sent back to Gaza before the trial against his alleged attackers? Or at least, why did they not take his testimony under a pre-trial procedure, which is specifically provided for doing so, where there is concern that a witness, especially a foreign one, might not be reachable for testimony later?Offir was not yet in office when the Palestinian detainee/alleged victim/key witness was sent back to Gaza in October. This was approved, or not blocked, by Tomer Yerushalmi.Given that ultimately she resigned for having leaked the Sde Teiman video against the five soldiers and delayed their trial for around a year, it is quite possible that she, paradoxically, also let the witness go with the hope that a plea deal might be cut to end the case without a trial and avoid her role in leaking the video being discovered.Pressed whether Offir would have decided the case differently had the detainee's testimony been taken before he was released to Gaza, as provided for by Israeli criminal procedure, he would likely demur. He would say that the controversy surrounding the case about how badly the five soldiers had been harmed by the pre-trial leak of the video and the multiple ways that Tomer Yerushalmi and some of her prosecutors broke the law would still have made the case impossible to win in court, and led to withdrawing it.Interestingly enough, while Offir is clearly concerned about the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ), like many other top Israeli officials, he did not seem to weigh the specific impact of his Sde Teiman decision on how those bodies will move against Israel.In other words, some might have said it would be important to bring the five soldiers to trial, even if the prosecution lost, to show Israel's commitment to bringing its own soldiers to trial when they allegedly beat Palestinian detainees.By withdrawing one of the few and large cases against Israeli soldiers for their treatment of Palestinians, Offir and the IDF may have undermined Israel's credibility before the ICC and the ICJ.Offir would likely respond that if he cannot win a case in court, he cannot proceed, regardless of the impact of the ICC and the ICJ. He might also add that these bodies have already shown heavy bias in going after top Israeli officials.A new twist is that the Post has learned that it has now become unclear how many more Sde Teiman-related indictments there may be for a large number of questionable Palestinian detainee deaths.In February, the Post reported, based on sources, that there could be quite a few on the way.At the time, the Post also reported that even with the expected new indictments, many of the deaths were likely actually cases of Palestinian fighters who were mortally wounded on the battlefield and brought back to Sde Teiman to see if they could be saved and interrogated, but did not ultimately make it.Still, it also appears that something unclear may have changed regarding some other potential Sde Teiman cases, the Post understands.It is worth noting that in February 2025, an IDF soldier was already convicted in the “small” Sde Teiman Palestinian detainee abuse case, with the defendant-soldier sentenced to potential additional prison time, on top of time he spent under arrest relating to the trial, if he would re-violate certain laws, and demoted to the