More Israeli soldiers are committing suicide than ever before. Today, the number of soldiers who have taken away their lives stands at 61 since the Israeli war on Gaza that began on 7 October, 2023.
These are official figures put out by the Israeli army with the figure likely to be much higher than that. As proof, the number of those soldiers who attempted suicide but failed is put at 279.
Israeli soldiers, long actively serving in the excecution of the Gaza genocide, have resorted to desperate and extreme measures. So far, 20 soldiers took their lives in 2025 because of the atrocities they seen and committed in Gaza.
The trend has been raising since October 2023 when at least seven soldiers committed suicide in the last three months of that year and with the total number standing at 17. In 2024, and at the heights of the Israeli war and when at least 43,000 Palestinians were killed, including 17,000 children, the suicide figure amongst Israeli soldiers stood to at least 21.
The trend has become increasingly disturbing for the Israeli authorities because in previous years the suicide rates were 14 in 2022, 11 in 2021, 9 in 2020, 12 in 2019, 9 in 2018 and 16 soldiers took their lives in 2017. These numbers were considered ‘normal’ in an Israel army that had a manpower force of around 170,000 but increased by 350,000 soon after the war started.
However, the disturbing suicidal trends become more glaring during the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza. The situation was becoming so bad that the Knesset Research and Information Committee (KRIC) produced a full report on 28 October, 2025. It focused on the period between January 2024 till July 2025 and found that one in seven of those who attempted suicide succeeded in killing themselves.
The KRIC, mainly a data collection committee, found that combat ground soldiers serving in the different areas of Gaza accounted for 78 percent of all suicides in 2024 and which is about 45 percent more of the suicidals from 2017 till 2022.
The committee also found that only 17 percent of those that committed suicide had met with a mental health officer in the previous two months. Because of the extent of violence, horror of the Israeli war, and probably the extent of the stiff resistance to the Israeli soldiers which resulted in their death and injuries, many had required psychiatric treatment.
Since October 2023 up till today 85,000 required psychological treatment in the rehabilitation unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Today, over 10,000 soldiers are undergoing intensive medical health treatment that include mental health problems.
One of the major health mental problems suffered by Israeli soldiers in Gaza is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which includes flashbacks of reliving violent events, nightmares, feeling on edge, avoidance of places, constant fear, detachment, emotional numbness, memory problems and constant stress.
Most of these soldiers were in places in Gaza were mass bombs we’re being dropped, houses decimated, blood everywhere. As UN statistics show Gaza was being razed to the ground with more than 60 millions tons of debris and rubble and in many cases soldiers going through these with the constant fear of Palestinian fighters watching them, shooting at them or booby-trapping their tanks that was a major characteristic of this war.
Why Did They Commit Suicide?
Official figures estimate there are under 4000 who are diagnosed with PTSD and another 9000 who are yet to be diagnosed with the mental disease that is ripping Israeli society apart with soldiers taking their lives in different locations at military bases, in parks, near a beach, in their homes, and in one case, outside a Jewish settlement in Safad where a soldier, named Daniel Edri, sat in his car and set fire to it and burning himself alive.
His previous job was to carry the bodies of dead Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza. In a note to his mother, he wrote he continued to be haunted by the “smell and vision” of corpses he carried after being killed in combat with Palestinian resistance fighters.
And then in many cases there was the issue of deep guilt and which psychologists prefer to call “moral injury” carried by Israeli soldiers. There was the case of Eliran Mizrahi, a 40-year-old engineer who committed suicide on 7 June 2024, two days before he was called up to go back to Rafah, the southern-most city in the Gaza Strip. He was a D9 armored bulldozer operator and had previously spent 186 days in Gaza.
His co-operator Guy Zaken later told the Knesset committee that they were ordered on many occasions “to run over terrorists, dead or alive in the hundreds.” Zaken used a graphic description to describe what he was doing, saying ‘everything squirts out” in reference to the crushed bodies under his bulldozer.
He told the committee he can no longer eat meat because the sight and smell of it reminded him of what he did on the battlefield field of Gaza, scars which will likely haunt him for the rest of his life.
And then there was the case of Lithuanian Jew Tomas Adzgauskas who killed himself in a public park outside northern Gaza on 4 December, 2025. He was a reserve officer and a sniper in the Givati Brigade.
Although he was discharged from the Israeli army in April, 2024, the psycholgical stress eventually led him to suicide.
In a final note on Facebook, he wrote “…I am ruin and devastation…I did things that can’t be forgiven, and I can’t live with it anymore…there is a demon inside me that has been chasing me since 7.11…”
These were just two names among the many like Norwegian-born Dan Phillipson and Roi Wasserstein. The last took a gun to his head after 300 days of active duty in war-devastated Gaza while Ariel Meir Taman was found dead in his home in July 2025.
They died because of what they saw and did in Gaza, couldn’t believe their eyes and eventually decided to end their lives because of the scale of devastation and killing as 200,000 tons of explosives were dropped on the 364-kilometer Gaza Strip that is equivalent to 13 or 14 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
CrossFireArabia
