After Gaza duty, Israeli soldiers kill themselves

Observer

2 days ago

Daniel Edri returned to Israel alive. He had served as a reservist in Gaza and southern Lebanon. When the missions ended, he carried no visible wounds. Yet he returned home unable to sleep, unable to escape the memories. He spoke to his mother about the smell of bodies and the civilians he had seen dying. He asked for psychiatric care but was refused. On July 5, 2025, he drove to a remote place and set himself on fire inside his car. Gaza didn't kill him — the war followed him home.
Since Israel launched its campaign on Gaza in October 2023, at least 28 Israeli soldiers have died by suicide. The official figure for 2024 alone reached 21 — the highest annual number in more than a decade, according to Israeli and international media, including France24. Most of these soldiers served in Gaza or along the Lebanese front. Many were reservists — ordinary citizens turned into soldiers, instructed to destroy, then left to live with what they did.
Their return is not marked by honour. They come back carrying psychological burdens that continue long after the fighting stops. Those who operated bulldozers to flatten neighbourhoods, those who launched drones at apartment buildings, those who entered homes with rifles — they are returning home with something that military training cannot manage: conscience.
The Israeli military describes these suicides as being within expected norms. Yet even within Israeli society, there is growing doubt. Public trust in the army's transparency on suicide cases has declined sharply. According to France24, it dropped from 46 per cent in 2020 to 38 per cent in 2021. Behind the numbers lies a much deeper issue — one Israel's leaders would rather not confront.
According to Israeli health ministry projections, more than 14,000 soldiers will require long-term medical or psychological treatment as a result of this war. Many are already being treated for post-traumatic stress, severe anxiety and depression. Most are young men in their early twenties. They were trained to carry out orders. They were not prepared to face what those orders meant.
The damage they inflicted on Gaza is undeniable. Thousands of civilians have been killed. Entire families have been erased. Hospitals, mosques, schools and residential blocks have been levelled. These were not anonymous strikes. They were carried out by individuals with names, ranks — and now, silent trauma. When a soldier kills himself after returning home, it is not simply a private tragedy. It is a consequence of the very structure that sent him.
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Inside Gaza, people count their dead by the hundreds and thousands. In Israel, the war is beginning to claim soldiers through their own hands. These are not accidents. They are outcomes. An army that demands destruction cannot remain untouched by it. What began on the front lines has continued inside the minds of Israeli soldiers returning home.
Israel has long invested in its military. It prides itself on discipline, technology and control. What it cannot control is what happens when the violence comes home. These suicides expose a contradiction: the state believes it can wage war without limits and still expect its soldiers to return to normal life. The deaths show otherwise.
The responsibility for each suicide lies with every level of command — from the soldier on the ground to those who designed the campaign. When a soldier takes his own life, it exposes the moral emptiness of the structure he served.
The war continues. So will these deaths. They are no longer confined to Gaza. They are no longer anonymous. Israel's army is absorbing a cost it does not fully acknowledge: the slow internal erosion of those it trained to obey. The rifles have been set down, but the memory of what they did remains loaded.
Daniel Edri will not appear in Gaza's statistics. His name will not be among those buried in Gaza. Yet his story belongs to this war — a reminder that violence spreads beyond borders and returns in forms like silence, shame and the weight of actions that cannot be undone.