The name of an Israeli military intelligence officer who died under mysterious circumstances in 2021 while in jail facing security charges was cleared for publication Saturday night, after the Israel Defense Forces’ Court of Appeals lifted a gag order on the case.
Senior Academic Officer (the equivalent of captain) Tomer Eiges, from Haifa, was jailed under accusations of grave security offenses.
He was found in serious condition in his cell in May 2021, on the eve of the Shavuot holiday, and was pronounced dead in the hospital a few hours later. He was 24 years old at the time of his death. There was no clear sign of the cause.
An autopsy in Israel, as well as a blood test at a specialized forensic laboratory in the United States, were inconclusive.
The entire case, including Eiges’s identity, was subjected to both military censorship and court-issued gag orders, despite the fact that the information — including his full name and picture — was widely available online since the incident.
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Eiges spent nine months in military prison awaiting trial, while his attorneys and military prosecutors were negotiating a potential plea deal, cut short by his sudden death.
Though no official cause of death was determined according to the IDF, military officials indicated off the record that it appeared to be a suicide. His family has pushed back against this claim, however.
The prison where the officer had been held, Neve Tzedek, was newly opened and specifically designed to make it difficult for inmates to commit suicide, with closed-circuit cameras throughout the structure and specially-designed fittings to prevent people from being able to hang themselves.
Footage aired by the Kan public broadcaster Saturday evening shows him collapsing to the floor in the bathroom of his cell in late April 2021 — just a month before his death.
He managed to crawl into the cell’s main area and signal to the security camera for help. According to the outlet, this incident was preceded by a string of similar falls, one of which landed him in the hospital.
Security camera footage from the Neve Tzedek military prison shows Tomer Eiges, a soldier jailed on suspicion of committing grave security offenses, collapsing in his cell on April 24, 2021. (Screenshot/Kan)
The deceased soldier was described by friends and family as an incredibly skilled computer programmer, a prodigy who began working in the field as a teenager. When he was still in high school, he completed a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Haifa and later worked at a tech company before being drafted to the IDF.
Eiges was facing expected charges for nearly two dozen offenses, as well as a likely 10-year or longer prison sentence, for alleged acts committed while serving as an intelligence officer in the army’s Unit 8200, the Military Intelligence Directorate’s signals intelligence unit.
Then-IDF chief of staff Aviv Kohavi said the officer had nearly caused damage to a state secret, but the damage was prevented at the last minute following his arrest in August 2020.
The young man was nabbed by Shin Bet officers while riding his electric scooter from the Glilot military base, where Unit 8200 is headquartered, back to his apartment in Ramat Hasharon. He was locked up after his interrogation.
The IDF said that the soldier acted alone and did not commit the actions on behalf of a foreign government, for financial reasons or out of a specific ideology, but rather from unspecified “personal motivations.”
Illustrative. An Israeli military police officer, right, directs two imprisoned Israeli soldiers through a door at Prison Four, Israel’s largest military prison, at the Tzrifin military base in central Israel on April 26, 2018. (Miriam Alster/FLASH90)
According to the family, the army deleted much of the officer’s social media record going back as far as 2018, the Haaretz newspaper reported. A relative of the officer, not identified in the report, told the daily that “the anger is at the attempt to disappear a person who died in military prison.”
“We don’t know anything. To this day, no one has explained to us what happened,” the relative said. “The whole way that the army is behaving looks like an attempt to hide their failures. How can it be that they are trying to wipe out a person in this way?”
Family members said that hours before his death, the officer had called his parents on the eve of Shavuot. The family sources said he didn’t sound distressed and asked them to bring him clothes on their next visit, other personal items and treats to tide him over during his time in prison. The family also noted his previous relocation from one prison to a newer facility “was good for him,” and he was in a positive mindset.
In 2023, the military recognized Eiges as a fallen soldier even though he was no longer enlisted at the time of his death. The logo of the IDF and his military ID number were then added to his gravestone, and his family was eligible for benefits from the Defense Ministry.
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