Haaretz Archives - Page 2 of 6

Why Are Israeli Soldiers Committing Suicide?

CrossFireArabia
July 14, 2025

The number of Israeli soldier committing suicide after serving in Gaza is going up at alarming rates. Just last Thursday a soldier soldier took a gun to his head and fired point-blank.

The incident was at the Sde Teiman military base in southern Israel. The soldier had just returned from fighting in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the soldier was a member of the notorious Golani Brigade that has been fighting in Gaza soon after 7 October, 2023 and who was being questioned by the Israeli military police for bloody incidents carried out in Gaza.

He had come to the military base for a rest from the fighting but soon found out the military police were waiting for him according to Haaretz.

Its rare to investigate soldiers committing atrocities in Gaza but a probe was opened against him a month ago where it was reported that his commanders decided to confiscate his weapon.

On the night of the incident shooting he slowly took the gun of his friend who was his asleep and pulled the trigger on himself.

Its understood, he was suffering from a sever psychological depression since his close friend was killed in a bomb explosion in Gaza last month.

The number of Israeli soldiers committing suicide have shot up since the start of the Gaza war in October 2023.

On Sunday, a reserve soldier killed himself in a forest near the northern city of Safed due to psychological problems from the Gaza war.

About 21 soldiers took away their lives in 2024 according the Israel Hayom newspaper. This is while Haaretz said that 42 soldiers committed suicide since the start of the Israeli genocide.

Last week another Israeli soldier took away his life just after celebrating his 24th birthday having served in the wars on Gaza and Lebanon.

“He told me he saw horrors. He couldn’t stand the pain anymore,” the mother of soldier Daniel Edri told Walla News.

“He told me that he saw horrors, and said to me: Mom, I smell the smell of the bodies and I see the bodies all the time,” his mother recalled. He was discharged from the army five months ago and was involved in transporting the bodies of dead Israeli soldiers.

His life stopped after he set himself on fire inside his car outside an Israeli settlement near the Palestinian town of Safad, pointing out that he was mentally disturbed.

Many have long reported that there is a clear mental health crisis in the Israeli army with the highest toll in 13 years of soldiers taking away their lives

News

Haaretz: Hamas Still Has 40,000 Fighters

CrossFireArabia
May 26, 2025

Top Israeli military commanders say that power of Hamas has not diminished confirming that the military of their movement’s armed wing, the Izz Aldin Al Qassam Brigades, still has around 40,000 fighters.

This is a new assessment published by the Hebrew daily, Haaretz. It says that the Israeli commanders conclude in a detailed military assessment that the military manpower of Hamas, at 40,000 fighters, remain as they were before 7 October, 2023 when the war on Gaza was launched.

Despite the bloody war and mass destruction of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military leaders still believe Hamas still possesses a number of long-range rockets and hundreds and perhaps thousands, of short-range shells and mortar shells.

Relaying on the same Israeli military sources, the newspaper states that it has been told that future Israeli operations will be carried out in areas where the captives – 59 and 22 still still alive – are likely to be held. However, it added these operations will be conducted in direct coordination with the Israeli Prisoners and Missing Persons Authority to ensure risk reduction. This is while the Israeli sources say that plans are underway to evacuate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to pre-determined gathering areas, most notably to Al-Mawasi, which currently houses approximately 700,000 displaced persons.

Until the new Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir assumed his post last March, the military believed Hamas no longer possessed an organized military structure. However, the new assessment indicates that the movement retains effective operational capabilities, despite having suffered heavy blows.

Israeli military officials said that the fighting has changed since then, with the adoption of “massive fire” tactics and the systematic destruction of Hamas’s military infrastructure, including tunnels.

Further, Israeli military intelligence are of the view that the local protests against Hamas in the Gaza Strip is too small and doesn’t constitute a “civilian uprising” and where the Islamist movement continues to enjoy mass support.

According to the Israeli newspaper however, an estimated one-third of Gaza’s population remains loyal to Hamas, another third belongs to Fatah, and the remainder is unaffiliated with any faction.

News

French Rabbi Receives Israeli Death Threats

CrossFireArabia
May 18, 2025

French Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur is facing death threats and intense backlash after criticizing Israeli ministers for justifying the starvation of civilians in Gaza.

Horvilleur, a leader of the Liberal Jewish Movement in Paris and editor of the Jewish magazine Tenou’a, wrote last week that “starving innocents or condemning children neither relieves pain nor avenges the dead.” Her comments targeted Israeli ministers who publicly defended blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza.

In her editorial, she wrote, “Without a future for the Palestinian people, there is no future for the Israeli people either.” Zionists swiftly responded with online abuse, including calls for her execution. Many threats were gender-based, claiming women shouldn’t speak or hold religious authority.

According to Haaretz, Horvilleur had been a prominent defender of Israel in French media, especially after the October 7 military operation. She said, “I’m too Zionist for some, not Zionist enough for others. I’m caught in the crossfire.”

She confirmed that French police are now monitoring her social media accounts due to the volume and severity of threats.

In a show of solidarity, 42 French intellectuals — both Jewish and non-Jewish — signed an op-ed in La Tribune du Dimanche. They denounced the Israeli government for eroding ‘democracy’, threatening detainees, expanding settlements, and preparing for the annexation of occupied territories.

However, Meir Ben Haim, French spokesperson for Israel’s Otzma Yehudit party, accused Horvilleur and her allies of “violating Jewish tradition.” He warned, “The price will be blood,” according to the Quds News Network.

Opinion

Haaretz: US Finally Independent From Israel

CrossFireArabia
May 12, 2025

An article in Haaretz reports that Israel has suffered several blows in recent days in its historical relations with the United States. And that US President Donald Trump no longer requires Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Tel Aviv for Washington’s nuclear cooperation with Riyadh.

Adding insult to injury to the Israel occupying state, Trump has reached an agreement with the Houthis Ansar Allah group to end US military strikes on Yemen. This is plus the fact the US has began negotiations with Iran without the blessing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Further to that a US official in the Trump administration also held direct contact with the Hamas.

However, Odeh Basharat in his Haaretz article argues that the most painful blow Israel has ever suffered was Trump’s dismissal of his National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, due to a discussion he had with Netanyahu, behind Trump’s back, about launching a military attack on Iran.

Basharat said the United States has finally begun to wake up and free itself from the shackles of Israel, and act as an independent state, not a “banana republic.” Basharat, a journalist from the Arab world, expressed his astonishment at these developments and wondered whether what was happening before his eyes was real or merely an illusion.

The writer believes that a seismic clash is taking place between the two countries and the two men, and that all the reasons are now converging. “America is gaining its independence 250 years after the beginning of its First Revolutionary War,” referring to the war that took place between 1765 and 1783, when 13 British colonies in North America rejected British colonial rule and gained their independence.

Basharat describes this emancipation as the Great American Rebellion, and attributes its causes to the fact that the world—and the United States as part of it—felt deeply concerned by what the writer, with biting sarcasm, called “Israel’s diplomatic acrobatics,” its “enlightened occupation” of the Palestinian territories, and its “closure (of the Gaza Strip) that allows only air in.”

According to the article, as soon as Israel reaches an agreement on a particular issue, it adds new conditions the next day. Although the Arab states that signed peace agreements with Israel were not required to recognize it as a Jewish and democratic state, only the Palestinians are required to do so, which, as Basharat argues, permanently relegates Israeli Arabs to second-class citizens.

According to the article, it has become clear that Netanyahu is deceiving everyone: Arabs, Jews, and Americans, not just Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement, as he previously boasted to Israeli police investigators that he misled and deceived them, then bombed them.

Since the time of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, the state’s policy has been based on force. In contrast, Trump seems to believe in a policy of carrots and sticks—meaning diplomacy and force combined—according to the article.

The author claims that the US president thinks differently, as demonstrated by his actions toward the Houthis, Iran, and the tariffs. Once he realized he had failed, he took a step back.

As for Israel, its problem does not lie solely with Netanyahu, as Basharat argues, but rather with the fact that it has not offered an alternative to force. Only three of its former prime ministers, according to the article, have taken a different path: Moshe Sharett, whom Ben-Gurion was keen to overthrow; Yitzhak Rabin, who paid for it with his life; and Ehud Olmert, who was ousted before even presenting his plan.

Furthermore, Israel has long treated the White House as a branch of its prime minister’s office, intervening in the wording of every sentence in documents issued by Washington regarding Israel, according to the Haaretz article as reported in Al Jazeera.

Opinion

‘Zionism a Mistake’ – Israeli Historian Tom Segev

CrossFireArabia
April 27, 2025

Tom Segev, one of Israel’s most renowned historians, has broken a decades-long silence. On his 80th birthday, he declared that Zionism—Israel’s founding ideology—was a mistake.

In a deeply personal interview with Haaretz, Segev said, “Zionism is not such a great success story. It also doesn’t provide security to Jews. It’s safer for Jews to live outside Israel.” He added that Zionism created myths instead of solutions.

Born in Jerusalem in 1945 to Jewish German parents who fled the Nazis, Segev has spent more than 50 years researching Israel’s history. His books include 1967, The Seventh Million, and Soldiers of Evil, all known for challenging Israeli narratives.

In the interview, Segev shared a painful truth about his father’s death. He grew up believing his father was killed by an Arab sniper during the 1948 war. “I was able to say that he was killed during the War of Independence and that I was a war orphan.”

But later, Segev’s sister revealed a different story. Their father had actually died in a freak accident—falling from a drainpipe while trying to deliver coffee to guards. He stated that he was brought up on a lie.

This moment of reckoning made him question everything—including the stories Israel tells about itself.

Segev now says the Zionist project was never meant for people like his parents. “My parents started to plan their return to Germany”, he revealed. “They were never Zionists and they wanted to go home. A month after the last letter my father wrote to a friend about how much he wanted to go back – he was killed.”

Despite growing up in Israel, Segev never fully embraced Zionist ideals. He stressed that much of what Israelis were told was myth.

In his academic work, Segev often turns to documents rather than oral testimonies. He famously challenged former Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in a 1968 interview, questioning the idea that Ben-Gurion became Zionist at age three.

Segev believes the Holocaust has been politically weaponized. In The Seventh Million, he argued that instead of teaching democracy and human rights, Israel used the Holocaust to fuel fear and justify wars.

He also criticized internal discrimination within Israeli society. In his book 1949: The First Israelis, Segev exposed how Jewish colonial settlers from Arab countries were pushed into camps, while Europeans were given hotels.

Segev insists he isn’t ideological. “People have also said I am anti-Zionist, but I am not an ideologue and not a philosopher, and I don’t think in terms of ideologies,” he says. “It was said that I want to shatter myths. But that’s not true, either. I was not part of the ‘New Historians’ but rather of the ‘First Historians.’ With respect to the state’s establishment there was no history here – just mythology and a great deal of indoctrination. In the 1980s we opened documents in the archives and said, ‘Wow, this isn’t what we were taught in school.’”

“We need to remember that the majority of the Holocaust survivors did not come to live in Israel and that the majority of Jews in the world are not coming to Israel”, he stressed. “They can, but they don’t want to live in this country. So Zionism is not such a great success story. It also doesn’t provide security to Jews. It’s safer for Jews to live outside Israel,” as reported in the Quds News Network.