Does a viral video show Israeli soldiers celebrating the 2024 release of comrades who had been detained in connection with charges that nine soldiers had raped a Palestinian at a desert prison camp? No, that's not true: The video was first posted to X on November 10, 2023 and depicts a rowdy party unrelated to the Sde Teiman camp rape case. The prisoner center was set up after Israel's Knesset in December of 2023 passed the "Unlawful Combatants" law exempting some Palestinian detainees from prisoner of war protection. Arrests in the Sde Teiman rape case were made in July of 2024, eight months after the party video had been posted online.
The claims about the party video were made in a July 7, 2025 X.com post (archived here) by the @Partisan_12 account. The post opened: "Do you know what this celebration was for?" It continued:
1$rael released 9 soldiers who RAP€D PAIESTlNlAN hostages in detention centre... This is what western media hides from you!
This is what the post looked like on Twitter at the time this fact check was written:
The video does show Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers partying. But the event was a wartime morale-booster featuring Avihu Pinhasov, a former Israeli Eurovision contestant. Posted to X on November 10, 2023, the video was central to disciplinary actions taken against soldiers who attended the rager on an IDF base, as reported by The Jewish Chronicle (archived here) on November 17, 2023. Below is an embed of the original post:
כמה שאני אוהב אותם שמחים
-- אורן חסקי 🇮🇱haski oren (@haski_oren) November 10, 2023
אביהו פנחסוב קורע מצחוק. pic.twitter.com/ZTZ2PAZbdL
Here's how the video, seen millions of times, of the IDF base party featured in news coverage of the disciplinary case:
(Source: Screenshot made by Lead Stories of thejc.com web page.)
The Sde Teiman detention camp rape case has been widely covered by the press in Israel and in the U.S., including CNN (archived here) and The Washington Post (archived here). The detention center was set up at a desert Army post after Israel's Knesset adopted, on December 18, 2023, the "Unlawful Combatants Law" which exempted certain Palestinian combatants from protections granted by law to prisoners of war. The law was one of several measures adopted after the attack by Hamas militants from the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023.
Some soldiers arrested on suspicion of raping and abusing a Palestinian held at Sde Teiman have indeed been released, but those releases were reported in August 2024, long after the rowdy party video was posted to X.
Lead Stories' search of Google News and Yahoo! News' indexes of news stories did not yield reports of the final disposition of the case, but The Times of Israel reported (archived here) five of the arrested soldiers were on house arrest.
Readers interested in more Lead Stories fact checks about the IDF will find them collected here.
