Touching, the story of an Israeli soldier who commits suicide
Trauma from Gaza's Brutal Aggression, Israeli Soldier Suicides
Israeli Army. (Al Jazeera) A 40-year-old father of four, Eliran Mizrahi, was deployed to the Gaza Strip, Palestine, following the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli military reservist returned a different person, traumatized by what he witnessed in the war against Hamas in the area.
That's what his family told CNN. Six months after he was first sent to war, he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at home. Before he was scheduled to be redeployed, he committed suicide. "He left Gaza, but Gaza did not release him. And he died after that, from post-war trauma," said his mother, Jenny Mizrahi.
The Israeli military says it is providing treatment to thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD or mental illness caused by trauma during the war. The number of suicides is unclear, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has not provided official figures.
A year later, Israel's war on Gaza has killed more than 42,000 people, according to Gaza's health ministry. The United Nations (UN) reported that most of the victims killed were women and children.
The war, which was launched after Hamas killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages, has become Israel's longest war since the Jewish state was founded. Now the war has now spread to Lebanon. Some soldiers say they fear being drafted into another conflict.
"Many of us are very afraid of being drafted again to fight in Lebanon," an IDF medic who served for four months in Gaza told CNN. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "Many of us don't trust the current government."
The Israeli government--with rare exceptions--has closed Gaza to foreign journalists except under IDF guard, making it difficult to fully capture Palestinian suffering or the army experience there. Israeli soldiers fighting in the enclave told CNN they witnessed horrors the outside world will never understand. Their stories provide a rare glimpse into the brutality of what critics call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's eternal war and the invisible impact it is having on the soldiers involved.
For many soldiers, the war in Gaza is a fight for Israel's survival and must be won at all costs. However, the battle also takes a mental toll that, due to stigma, is largely invisible. Interviews with an Israeli soldier, a medic, and the family of Mizrahi, a reservist who committed suicide, provide insight into the psychological toll the war has taken on Israeli society.
Bulldozer
Mizrahi was deployed to Gaza on October 8 last year and tasked with driving a D-9 bulldozer, a 62-tonne armored vehicle that can withstand bullets and explosives. He was a civilian for most of his life, working as a manager for an Israeli construction company. After witnessing the massacres carried out by Hamas, he felt the need to fight, Jenny told CNN.
The reservist spent 186 days in the enclave until he suffered a knee injury followed by hearing damage in February when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hit his vehicle. He was pulled out of Gaza for treatment and in April was diagnosed with PTSD and received weekly talk therapy.
The treatment didn't help. "They don't know how to treat them (soldiers)," said Jenny, who lives in Israel's Ma'ale Adumim settlement, occupied West Bank. "They (soldiers) said the war was very different. They saw things that had never been seen in Israel."
When Mizrahi was on leave, he suffered from bouts of anger, sweating, insomnia, and withdrawal from social life. He told his family that only those who were with him in Gaza could understand his experience. "He always said, no one will understand what I see," his sister, Shir, told CNN.
Jenny wonders if her son has killed someone and can't get over it. "He saw a lot of people die. Maybe he even killed someone. (But) we don't teach our children to do things like this," he said. "So, when he did this, something like this, maybe it was a surprise to him."
Guy Zaken, Mizrahi's friend and fellow bulldozer driver, provided further insight into their experiences in Gaza. "We're seeing very, very, very difficult things," Zaken told CNN. "Hard things to accept." The former soldier has spoken publicly about the psychological trauma experienced by Israeli troops in Gaza. In testimony to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, the army had to, "Run into terrorists, dead and alive, by the hundreds. It all gushed out."
Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, because it reminds him of the horrific scenes witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza. He struggled to sleep at night, the sound of explosions ringing in his head. "When you see a lot of flesh outside and blood, both our blood and theirs (Hamas or civilians), it really affects you when you eat," he told CNN, referring to the body as meat.
He argued that the majority of those he encountered were, "Terrorists." "The civilians we saw, we stopped and brought them drinking water, and we let them eat our food," he recalled. He added that even in such a situation, Hamas fighters would open fire on them. "So, there is no such thing as a citizen," he said, referring to the ability of Hamas fighters to mingle with civilians. "This is terrorism."
However, when soldiers do encounter civilians, many face a moral dilemma, according to IDF medics who spoke to CNN anonymously. There was a very strong collective attitude of distrust among Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians in Gaza, especially at the start of the war, the medic said. There is a perception that Gazans, including civilians, "are evil, that they support Hamas, that they help Hamas, that they hide ammunition," the medic said.
However, on the ground, some of these attitudes change, "when you actually see Gaza civilians before your eyes," they said.
The IDF said it was doing everything it could to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, including by sending text messages, making phone calls and distributing evacuation leaflets to warn civilians before attacks. Despite this, civilians in Gaza have been repeatedly killed in large numbers, including while taking refuge in areas that the military itself has designated as safe zones.
The mental health impact in Gaza is likely to be enormous. Aid groups and the UN have repeatedly highlighted the devastating mental health consequences of the war on civilians in Gaza. Many of them were scarred by the 17-year blockade and several wars with Israel.
After Mizrahi's suicide, videos and photos emerged on social media of reservists destroying homes and buildings in Gaza and posing in front of the damaged buildings. Some of the images, purportedly posted on his now-deleted social media accounts, appeared in a documentary interviewing him on Israel's Channel 13. His brother, Shir, said he saw many comments on social media accusing Mizrahi of being, “A murderer,” swearing at him, and replying with unpleasant emojis. "It was difficult," he said, adding that he tried his best to ignore it. "I know he's kind."
Not like other wars
Ahron Bregman, a political scientist at King's College London who served in the Israeli army for six years, including during the 1982 Lebanon War, said the Gaza war was unlike any war Israel had ever fought. "The war was very long," he said. And it's urban in nature which means soldiers are fighting among lots of people. Most of them are civilians.
Bulldozer operators are among those most directly exposed to the brutality of war, Bregman said. "What they saw were dead people and they cleaned them up (along) with the rubble," he told CNN. "They checked it out."
For many, the transition from the battlefield back to civilian life can be overwhelming, especially after urban wars involving the deaths of women and children, Bregman said. "How can you put your children to sleep when, you know, you see children being killed in Gaza?" Despite Mizrahi's PTSD, his family said he agreed to return to Gaza when he was called again. Two days before he was reassigned, he committed suicide.
In her home, Jenny has dedicated a room to her late son's memory with photos from his childhood and work in construction. Among the items his mother kept was the hat Mizrahi was wearing when he shot himself in the head, the bullet holes clearly visible.
Mizrahi's family started talking about his death after the IDF denied him a military funeral, saying he did not serve as an active reservist. They later reversed their decision.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that 10 soldiers committed suicide between October 7 and May 11, according to military data obtained by the newspaper. When asked by CNN about the number of suicides in the IDF since the war, Uzi Bechor, a psychologist and commander of the IDF's Combat Response Unit, said the medical corps is not permitted to provide figures and the military sees the suicide rate as largely unchanged.
"The suicide rate in the army has been more or less stable over the last five or six years," Bechor said, noting that the rate has actually been declining over the past 10 years. Although the number of suicides is higher, he said, the ratio so far is, "Pretty much the same as the previous year because we have more soldiers."
"That doesn't mean that there is a trend towards more suicides," Bechor told CNN. He did not provide CNN with the number of suicides or their rates. "Every case for us is heartbreaking," he said.
However, more than a third of those removed from combat were found to have mental health problems. In a statement in August, the Israeli Defense Ministry's rehabilitation division said that every month, more than 1,000 newly injured soldiers are transferred from the battlefield for treatment, 35% of whom complain of their mental condition with 27% experiencing reactions. mental or post-traumatic stress disorder.
It added that by the end of the year, 14,000 injured soldiers would likely be treated, about 40% of whom are expected to face mental health problems. More than 500 people die by suicide in Israel and more than 6,000 others attempt suicide every year, according to the country's health ministry, which notes that about 23% is unreported in the figures.
In 2021, suicide was the leading cause of death among IDF soldiers, the Times of Israel reported, citing military data showing at least 11 soldiers had committed suicide that year. Earlier this year, the Health Ministry attempted to refute rumors about an increase in the number of suicides since October 7, saying that the cases reported were isolated incidents in the media and social media.
Without providing figures, the ministry said there was a decrease in the number of suicides in Israel between October and December compared with the same months in recent years. Bregman, the Lebanon war veteran, said that PTSD and other mental health problems are easier to talk about now than they were in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to reduced stigma. However, he said, the soldiers leaving Gaza will carry (their experiences) with them for the rest of their lives.
IDF medics who spoke to CNN said that there are mental health officers designated for each army unit during and after deployment. Despite this, the impact of the war remains, the medic said, with soldiers as young as 18 suffering from mental trauma in Gaza. They often cry or appear emotionally numb, the medic added.
Normalize the abnormal
Bechor, the IDF psychologist, said that one way the military helps traumatized troops move on with their lives is to try to normalize what they have been through. In part by reminding them of the horrors that occurred on October 7th.
"This situation is not normal for humans," Bechor said. When soldiers return from the battlefield with PTSD symptoms, they ask, "How can I go home after what I saw? How can I interact with my children after what I saw?" "We try to normalize it and help them remember their values and why they went there (Gaza)," he told CNN.
For the tens of thousands of Israelis who volunteered or were called up to fight, the war in Gaza was seen not only as an act of self-defense but also as an existential battle. The idea was touted by Israel's political and military leaders as well as Israel's international allies.
Netanyahu described Hamas as the new Nazis and US President Joe Biden said that the old hatred of Jews supported by the Nazis was revived on October 7.
External threats to their country unite many Israelis, postponing domestic political disputes that have been dividing society for months. Meanwhile, the suffering of Palestinians is largely absent from Israeli television screens, which are dominated by news about hostages in Gaza.
After the Hamas attacks, polls showed that most Israelis supported the war in Gaza and did not want their government to stop fighting even as it negotiated for the release of the kidnapped hostages. On the one year anniversary of the October 7 attack, a survey published by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only 6% of Israelis think the war in Gaza should be stopped because of the huge cost in human lives.
However, some soldiers were unable to rationalize the horrors they had seen. When he returned from Gaza, Mizrahi often told his family that he felt invisible blood flowing from him, his mother said. Shir, his sister, blamed the war for her brother's death. "Because of the army, because of this war, my brother is not here," he said. "Maybe he didn't die from a bullet (in combat) or an RPG, but he died from an invisible bullet," he added, referring to his psychological pain.
What is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? PTSD is a mental health condition caused by an extremely stressful, frightening or distressing event, according to the UK's National Health Service. A person with PTSD often relives traumatic events through nightmares and flashbacks, and may experience feelings of isolation, irritability, and guilt. PTSD can develop immediately after a person experiences a disturbing event, or it can occur weeks, months, or even years later. (Was)