‘I saw the bodies of children’: moral injury and mental strain breaking IDF soldiers

IDF soldiers near the Israeli border with Gaza , September 2025

Tom Levinson reports in Haaretz on 16 September 2025:

A group of soldiers walks between houses, or more accurately, dilapidated structures once used for dwelling. Walls remain in place, remnants of life. This is a Nahal Brigade force on a search mission; soon, a bulldozer will arrive to destroy a little more of the destruction. The soldiers will surround it and provide cover, trying not to fall asleep. Usually, nothing happens, no one comes near, no figure enters the guns’ sights.

“I never imagined this is what I’ll be doing during my service,” admits Yoni, one of the soldiers. “That I would become a security guard for heavy machinery.”

But on that day in Beit Lahia, something happened, says Yoni (a psyeudonym, as are the names of other interviewees). “Terrorists, terrorists,” one soldier shouted. “We go into a frenzy, and I get on the Negev [a machinegun] right away and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. We then charged forward, and I realized it was a mistake.”

There were no terrorists there. “I saw the bodies of two children, maybe 8 or 10 years old, I have no idea,” recalls Yoni. “There was blood everywhere, lots of signs of gunfire, I knew it was all on me, that I did this. I wanted to throw up. After a few minutes, the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn’t a human being, ‘They entered an extermination zone, it is their fault, this is what war is like.'”

This was late last May, but the scene has not faded, nor has what happened afterward. Yoni told his commanders he wanted to see a mental health officer, but didn’t reveal why. “I told him everything, and he explained that there’s a concept called ‘moral injury.’ He said it’s a state where you act against your own values, and you’re then caught in a kind of dissonance between the values you believe in and your behavior.” At the end of the meeting, the officer recommended that Yoni not return to combat, and he was transferred to a support role. “I suffer from flashbacks to that event,” he shares. “Their faces come back to me, and I don’t know if I’ll ever forget them.”

Haaretz spoke to several soldiers completing their mandatory service who, over in recent months, have realized they can no longer serve in combat positions. Most of them explained it by citing burnout or their mental state, but there were also others, although relatively few, who justified their decision by citing “moral injuries” that scarred their souls. The cumulative testimonies that have reached Haaretz in recent months from both camps make it clear that this is not an anomaly or a statistical outlier.

Furthermore, according to estimates from sources in the Manpower Directorate, thousands of regular-service combat soldiers have had their service discontinued since the beginning of the war; some were completely discharged from the IDF due to their mental state, while others were transferred to combat-support or rear-echelon roles. Other officers who spoke with Haaretz claimed this was an underestimate and that the actual number is higher.

The estimations, alongside individual stories, paint a very different picture from IDF Spokesperson press releases, which are published verbatim day and night by Israeli media. “In our unit alone, dozens of soldiers have asked to be removed from combat,” admits an officer at the headquarters of one of the infantry brigades. “This is a phenomenon that has always existed, but never in these numbers; it’s getting out of control. The soldiers are burnt out, they can’t do it anymore.” Other regular combat brigades describe a similar reality. “There’s hardly a day when I don’t hear about a fighter begging to be transferred to a different role,” says an adjutant officer in one Armored Corps battalion.

Already after a few days of killing, Benny says, there were psychological effects, which have since intensified. ‘It’s killing me, it’s scarred my life.’

For Benny, a Nahal Brigade sniper, changing roles is no longer enough. The wound he describes is already too big, it has penetrated very deep. “It started about two months ago,” he testifies. “Every day we have the same mission: to secure the humanitarian aid in the northern Gaza Strip.” His and his friends’ day begins at 3:30 A.M. Accompanied by drones and armored forces, they set up a sniper position and wait. According to him, between 7:30 and 8:30 A.M., the trucks arrive and begin to unload their contents. Meanwhile, the residents try to move forward to get a good spot in line, but there’s a line in front of them that they don’t notice.

“A line that if they cross it, I can shoot them,” Beni explains. “It’s like a game of cat and mouse. They try to come from a different direction every time, and I’m there with the sniper rifle, and the officers are yelling at me, ‘Take him down, take him down.’ I fire 50-60 bullets every day, I’ve stopped counting kills. I have no idea how many I’ve killed, a lot. Children.”

He says there have been many times when he did not want to shoot but felt he had no choice. He was forced, threatened. “The battalion commander would yell over the radio, ‘Why aren’t you taking them down. They are heading our way. This is dangerous,'” he gives an example of the pressure vise. “The sense is that we are being positioned in an impossible situation, and no one had prepared us for this. The officers do not care if children die, the also do not care what it does to my soul. To them, I am just another tool.”

Already after a few days of killing, he says, there were psychological effects, which have since intensified. “It’s killing me, it’s scarred my life. Thoughts about all this death don’t leave my mind. I smell a bad odor, and my mind immediately interprets it as the smell of bodies.” And it’s not just what he remembers, but also what he experiences day and night. “Three times I’ve wet myself like a four-year-old kid. Once I even dreamed I was murdering my own family. I wake up five or six times a night. I see all the people I killed again. You have to understand, a sniper isn’t like a pilot – he sees his victims through the scope. It’s horrible, it’s impossible to explain.”

Benny is now trying to get discharged from the IDF. “I can’t stay there for even one minute,” he states. “I did it because I thought I was protecting my friends and my family, but it was a mistake. I don’t believe the officers, I don’t believe the government. I just want to get out of the army and start my life. Actually,” he sighs, “I don’t know if I’ll succeed, is it even possible?”

Aharon didn’t give up, and eventually, the commander granted his request; but in the meantime, until his appointment with the mental health officer, he was asked to return to combat in the Strip. ‘I was scared, but I didn’t want to show it to my friends.’

“What, you want to be a nobody staff soldier?”
Fifteen soldiers are moving in a column. The sun is scorching, socks stick to their feet, and their entire bodies are sweating. These are the days of the heatwave of last July. “When they told us we were going back to fight there, the only feeling that went through my head was confusion,” Aharon recalls, as he walks among the remains of houses on the streets of Beit Hanoun. There are no living people in them anymore, just packs of dogs. “After we finished last time, they told us we had won, that we had destroyed everything.”

But it turned out that the task of destruction was not over, and once again he was forced to secure engineering forces in the routine of demolition. They approach structures, place charges, an explosion, and then move on to the next destruction. However, one day, even before the signal was given, he heard a massive explosion. “Everyone thought we were ambushed, so we started shooting like crazy,” Aharon recalls, “I felt my pulse go wild, I couldn’t breathe, I thought it was my end, that 10 terrorists were about to jump on us.”

But no terrorist came. “In the probe they concluded that one of the charges was activated ahead of time by mistake,” he explains. An “operational accident” in military jargon, one of many. This time, no soldier was killed, so it is not “news,” nor were the commanders bothered. “In the evening we went back to the outpost, and everybody behaved as if nothing had happened, they did not even let us talk to a mental health officer,” says Aharon. The next day, he went on leave to his home in Jerusalem and noticed that something in him had changed.

“I walked around the market, and every sound made me jump, every child shouting,” he says. “When I went back home, I went into my room and started to cry. I could not understand what was happening to my body. My parents tried to ask me if I was all right, and I tried to hide it, I did not want them to worry. For four days I only came out of my room to eat.” When he returned to the army, he asked his commander to see a mental health officer. “He said to me, ‘What’s wrong with you? It was just a small explosion. You’re getting worked up over that? Are you trying to escape? To become a useless ‘jobnik’? You want to betray the people of Israel?’ I felt humiliated. I couldn’t believe that’s what he thought of me.”

Aharon didn’t give up, and eventually, the commander granted his request; but in the meantime, until his appointment with the mental health officer, he was asked to return to combat in the Strip. “I was scared, but I didn’t want to show it to my friends. There was even one time someone shot near me and I started to wet my pants.” Only after two weeks, he testifies, did he meet with a mental health officer. “He listened to everything I said, but then he explained that it would be a shame for me to stop being a combat soldier, that it would be a shame for the IDF to lose someone like me. I left feeling enraged. I felt like no one saw me, that I was invisible.”

Following this, he asked to meet with the battalion commander. “I told him I was very sorry, but I was no longer capable of being a combat soldier,” he recounts. “He told me that I would regret it for the rest of my life, that if something happened to my friends, I wouldn’t forgive myself, that it would haunt me. But after I burst into tears, he sighed and said in a condescending tone, ‘Fine, I’ll move you to an operational support platoon. We need people in logistics.’ I was finally able to breathe. Just not going back to Gaza – that’s all I wanted, that’s everything.”

Officially, the army refuses to provide relevant data that would clarify how many regular-service combat soldiers could no longer continue. The claim is that no such tracking is done. “But even if they were to provide something like that, it would be skewed,” argues a former officer in the Manpower Directorate. “Just like they do with reservist attendance, with no numbers, just percentages that no one can say exactly what they mean.”

However, it’s not just the scope of the phenomenon that remains in the dark, but also the way it’s being handled. In fact, the army admits that no uniform policy has been established regarding soldiers who ask to be transferred from combat roles. In cases where a mental health officer or another medical professional determines a soldier is unfit to continue combat, the officers are required to follow their directive. But what happens in other cases? Each battalion commander decides on their own.

“I don’t send a soldier who doesn’t want to fight into combat,” a commander of one of the Kfir Brigade battalions claimed in a conversation with Haaretz. “I’d rather go into combat with fewer soldiers than with a soldier who doesn’t want to be there and could endanger the others. If someone isn’t suited to be a combat soldier, they should go be a cook or a driver.” However, not all commanders take a similar approach. This is what three soldiers from the Nahal Brigade, who requested not to enter the Strip last July, can attest to.

The soldiers, whose case was first published by Kan public broadcaster, said they had lost many friends, were exposed to difficult sights and were suffering from a “deep internal crisis.”One of them even said that during an operation in Gaza, soldiers in his platoon mistakenly killed a woman and her two children who had entered an arbitrary “killing zone” designated by the army. “We didn’t know. We saw three figures and we shot according to orders,” he said. “After that incident, we lost three fighters due to PTSD. They suffered from nightmares, insomnia. They kept seeing those children.” But he says no one talked to them afterward; “Everything just went on as usual.”

How usual? Even a mental health officer who met with them after their refusal determined they were fit for combat, according to his standards. The brigade commander then decided to sentence them to prison. It was only due to the media and social media uproar that the army decided to reverse the decision. “The brigade commander made a mistake in his decision,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit was quick to brief military reporters.

However, not all cases reach the public eye. Haaretz was made aware of at least 23 regular-service soldiers who have been sentenced in recent months for refusing to enter the Strip; most are from the Nahal and Givati Brigades, as well as the armored brigades. Soldiers testify that the threat of a prison sentence sometimes causes them to retract their request.

“The battalion commander told me that if I don’t go back to the tank, he’ll send me straight to jail and will make sure to revoke my combat certificate,” an armored soldier from the Seventh Brigade illustrates. “It stressed me out, but it was mostly insulting. After everything I’ve been through, after everything I’ve given, that’s what you say to me? All I wanted was to finish my service in a role that would let me get my soul back in working order.”

According to the commander, he didn’t have enough soldiers. The soldier was angry but decided to give in, as he recalls the conversation. “I went back to the hell of Gaza. Today I feel like a zombie, barely functioning, waking up at night, just getting angry, kicking every thing I see,” he admits. “Sometimes the thought of breaking my own leg crosses my mind. I even tried once, but it didn’t work. I just limped around for two weeks like an idiot.”

He says he already considers himself dead, not just figuratively, but literally. “People do not understand how hard it is get up at night all sweaty after dreaming that your tank is on fire after hitting an IED. I can sometimes hear the yelling, imagine what it will be like,” he illustrates. “I do not share these thoughts with other company soldiers, so they won’t think I’m crazy, even though it seems to me that some of them have also experienced this. Every now and then you can hear someone talking in their sleep, sometimes screaming. Personally, the only thing keeping me going is the thought that it is going to be over soon and, after that, I intend to never put on uniform again – don’t they dare call me up.”

“Get your gun out of your mouth or you get docked one day of leave”
Khan Yunis, early August, a little after 3:00 A.M. A Kfir Brigade platoon is preparing for a routine attack. This is a veteran platoon; they’re already well-practiced in the preparations, having done them dozens of times. They fill up water, put food in their vests, check that their magazines are full and head out. For many hours they won’t do anything, so they say. Around 11:00 A.M., they enter an abandoned house that is still standing. The army calls this “locating.” They will wait there for hours for orders to continue the operation, and in the meantime, they’re stuck in a limbo of heat and boredom.

At some point, an argument breaks out. Three of the soldiers ask the platoon commander to take off their ceramic vests for a few minutes, but he refuses. “I felt like I was about to lose consciousness, that I was about to faint,” says Omer, one of the soldiers. “I just wanted to cool down, but the officer didn’t agree, so I started cursing at him.” But the officer, as three soldiers in the platoon testified, remained silent – and pulled the trigger. “He just shot the ground, right next to me,” Omer recounts. “By a miracle, it didn’t hit anyone. I was in shock, everyone was.”

Afterward, he says, the officer tried to convince them it was a joke. “He said he was just kidding, and that he did it on purpose to toughen us up, but I didn’t find it funny at all. For me, that was my sign that I had to get out of there,” he explains. “Everything suddenly came to the surface. I realized I don’t trust him, that I’m tired of charging and shooting for nothing, that I can’t stand peeing into a bottle in some house with rats in Gaza and suffering from itching all over my body.” And to all this, he adds, there’s also a broader context: participating in “more and more missions whose purpose no one really understands.”

After the operation was over, Omer approached the officer with one request: to stop being a combat soldier. “He said to me, ‘I’ll make you a deal – you won’t talk about what happened, and I’ll make sure you get any role you want.’ I felt it was a dirty trick, but I agreed. I was already worn out, exhausted; I just wanted to get out of there.” About a week later, Omer was transferred to a cook’s position. The incident was never reported to the brigade’s senior commanders.

However, this wasn’t the only unusual incident that occurred in Khan Yunis during that time. In another platoon within the Kfir Brigade, several soldiers told Haaretz that one of their friends threatened suicide twice after his commander refused to allow him to see a mental health officer. According to them, on one occasion, the soldier even put the barrel of his weapon in his mouth. “If you don’t take the weapon out of your mouth, you’ll get docked a day of leave,” the officer threatened him. The soldiers testified that they were forced to take the weapon out of his mouth themselves.

After the second suicide attempt, the soldiers went to the battalion commander, and only then was the soldier referred to a mental health officer, who immediately discharged him from the IDF. “The incident is severe, and lessons will be learned accordingly,” the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit told Haaretz at the time. “The platoon underwent a deep and serious process with the support of commanders and mental health professionals. At the end of the process, it was decided to disperse the soldiers among different platoons within the battalion.” As far as Haaretz knows, the officer was not discharged from service.

Yet, a disregard for soldiers’ mental health is not limited to junior officers in the brigade. In late June, Haaretz contacted the IDF regarding a soldier who had been exposed to several difficult incidents in the Strip and had made it clear he could no longer continue in a combat role due to severe mental difficulties. After a struggle, he was removed from combat service, but even though he stopped accumulating new difficult experiences, the old ones didn’t leave him, and the psychological treatment he received in the army wasn’t enough. “Every time something isn’t going well for this soldier, he turns to the media,” the then-brigade commander, Yaniv Barot, told Haaretz at the time. “He’s just faking it.”

A few weeks later, following another inquiry from Haaretz due to concerns that the soldier might harm himself, he was summoned for treatment at the Ta’atzumot clinic, which provides intensive care for soldiers suffering from psychological injuries. Lieutenant Colonel Michal Lifshitz, a psychiatrist and former head of the clinical branch of the Medical Corps, was quite decisive after a preliminary examination of his condition. “Suspected severe PTSD,” she wrote.

Besides the incident in the Kfir Brigade, Haaretz was made aware of five additional cases of suicide attempts by regular-service soldiers in the Gaza Strip over the past year. All the soldiers involved were discharged from the army. How many cases were there in total? The IDF refuses to provide any scrap of information about it.

Not only are suicide attempts in the Strip hidden from the public eye, but so is the number of soldiers and officers discharged for mental health reasons since the start of the war. The IDF refused to provide data on the matter, and the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit is even delaying a response to a request submitted by Haaretz under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago – which is against the law. “This is a request that requires collecting a large amount of information from several bodies dealing with the subject, and therefore the response was delayed for a long time,” the army stated in a response.

However, sources in the Manpower Directorate admit that the army “has a tendency to delay the publication or delivery of data that does not serve one of its goals.” According to a source in the IDF’s Mental Health branch, “The data are dramatic, especially concerning regular-service combat soldiers.”

During a discussion at the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last July – following Haaretz’s exposure of the conscription of post-traumatic reservists – a relevant figure was seemingly revealed. The head of the army’s Mental Health department, Col. Yaakov Rothschild, said at the time that since the beginning of the war, 1,135 regular and reserve soldiers had received a mental health exemption for PTSD. However, a check by Haaretz revealed that this is only partial data, as it includes only regular soldiers who were diagnosed with PTSD in the army, and not those who were discharged due to other mental health issues, including those who were diagnosed with the disorder after their discharge.

And there is another figure, classified against its will: Cases that didn’t end with just suicide attempts. “There was a very unusual event in Gaza, I’m okay, don’t worry,” a combat engineering officer wrote to his family last July. The next day, he committed suicide by detonating a fragmentation grenade in southern Gaza. His name was not authorized for publication.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit refused to answer the claim regarding the number of regular-service soldiers who requested to stop serving in combat roles and provided a general response regarding mental health care in the army: “The IDF invests significant resources in individual and mental health care. The policy on this issue is to provide professional, accessible and sensitive care proactively, in order to reach as many service members as possible who are suffering, to diagnose and offer appropriate treatment, and centers have been established for this purpose that have contacted thousands of service members. Any case that deviated from the expected care for an individual is dealt with immediately and optimally. If specific cases are brought forward, they will be handled promptly.”

This article is reproduced in its entirety