Trauma of Gaza War Leads to 76 Soldiers’ Suicides

Israel is a country that measures pain by counting. Israelis count the days of miluim (reserve duty) like rosary beads. They count ballistic missiles and funerals, hostages and hospital beds. They count “cleared” buildings and “secured” roads. And now they are counting something else — a number that doesn’t sit on the tongue the way battlefield casualty reports do, because it doesn’t feel like fate. It feels like failure.

Seventy-six IDF soldiers have died by suicide since Hamas’s massacre on Oct. 7, 2023, and the resulting Gaza War. More than 300 have attempted to snuff out their psychological pain. Those numbers aren’t a statistic; they are an indictment of how hard it still is to say, out loud, “I am not OK” — and be met with care before it’s too late.

The war made heroes out of ordinary people. It also made ghosts. Not the poetic kind. The kind that stand in your kitchen at 3 a.m. The kind that smash mirrors because they can’t bear to see the person who came home. The kind that turn a laugh line on a comedy stage into a confession. The kind that erupt in a living room, terrifying children who don’t understand why Abba’s eyes are suddenly flush with tears.

Israel is enduring the largest mental-health crisis in its history. Bloomberg’s Alisa Odenheimer described it as a wave of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety — and the economic price tag of trauma that will be paid for years, possibly decades. But the cost that matters most isn’t measured in shekels. It’s measured in an empty seat at a Shabbat table. It’s measured in a brother or sister who came to Israel from America to serve the Jewish people and is suddenly alone.

Ari: The Day Before Freedom

Sgt. Ari Goldberg came from Norfolk, Va., and fell in love with the Negev — with the desert, with the people, with the idea that Zionism could be lived with your hands, your boots, your blood donations every three months. He did the hard thing that Lone Soldiers do: he built a life from scratch in a language that resisted him. He pushed through an army that doesn’t always know what to do with someone “different,” someone who is too earnest, too foreign, too determined.

He served in the IDF’s Combat Engineering Corps. He wanted to be where it mattered. He fought in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. He was proud to defend the country he chose.

And then, one day before discharge — after celebrating, after helping his younger brother take his first steps into the same uniform — Ari was found dead in his apartment in Dimona.

Ari’s story breaks something in us because it violates the narrative we cling to: Just get through the service. Just make it to discharge. Then life begins. Ari made it to the doorway of civilian life. He even turned the key. And still, something inside him did not come home.

If a person can be “almost finished” and still fall, what does that say about the way we define recovery? About how we treat “transition” as a finish line instead of the most fragile stretch of road?

Josh: Dying Out of Uniform

Master Sgt. (res.) Joshua “Josh” Boone, originally from Boise, Idaho, was a U.S.-born Lone Soldier who immigrated to Israel (made Aliyah) in 2017 to join the IDF.

He served for 748 days since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Seven hundred and forty-eight. Let that number sit in your chest.

He was a sniper — a protector, a “sheepdog,” as the people who wrote about him called it. He wasn’t Israeli born; he didn’t grow up with sirens as background music. He came with a fire in him to protect the Jewish people. And when the ground war and the deployments kept coming, the battlefield followed him back through his front door.

Josh died out of uniform, after being demobilized. And suddenly, the country that needed his courage began arguing about whether he “deserved” a military burial.

There are few things more Israeli than bureaucracy meeting grief. Forms. Criteria. Committees. A legal distinction between a death “in service” and a death “because of service.” We will send you into hell, but if you don’t die there, we might not know what to do with you.

He was a sniper — a protector, a ‘sheepdog,’ as the people who wrote about him called it. He wasn’t Israeli born; he didn’t grow up with sirens as background music. He came with a fire in him to protect the Jewish people. And when the ground war and the deployments kept coming, the battlefield followed him back through his front door.

A Knesset bill now seeks to close that gap — to recognize suicides tied to combat stress as service-related, with dignity and military burial. That matters symbolically, and symbols matter here. But burial policy is not prevention. Recognition after death is not the same thing as a hand on the shoulder two weeks earlier, or a therapist who has an opening this week, or a commander trained to hear what’s being said in the silence between jokes.

Avraham: The Wound You Cannot See

Master Sgt. Avraham Zeren’s story is another tragedy that makes people look away — which is precisely why it must be faced.

Born in the Gush Etzion town of Bat Ayin south of Jerusalem, and today, living in Maskiyot in the Jordan Valley, Zeren is a hybrid American-Israel. His father, Hillel Zeren, made Aliyah from Baltimore.

Avraham was a husband, a father of three small children – sons, Peer Ami, 6, and Hesed Ranen, 3, and daughter, Tair Eretz, 18 months.

As a soldier, he carried responsibilities that most Israelis never have to imagine: handling the aftermath of death, including a fellow soldier’s suicide. He kept going. No decompression. No psychological processing. Just the next task. The next day. The next mask.

Then the symptoms arrived — nightmares, panic, a nervous system stuck in alarm mode. The kind of internal chaos that doesn’t show on a uniform inspection. The kind that convinces you you’re alone because you can’t explain it without sounding “weak,” “broken,” “dangerous,” “unreliable.”

Avraham reached a moment of crisis and pulled the trigger. But through G-d’s mercy he survived. Many don’t.

He blew his jaw off. Today – after two years of multiple reconstructive surgeries – his face looks normal. Through psychiatric care, he is slowly beginning to feel normal. It’s a long process, one that lasts a lifetime.

“What stays with me is not the drama of it. It’s the humiliation that follows — the shame that makes a person perform wellness for the psychiatrist, and the love of a spouse who refuses to accept the performance. In Avraham’s telling, healing didn’t come from erasing pain. It came from finding tools to live with what will never fully disappear, and from being treated like a human being rather than a malfunctioning soldier.”

That is the conversation Israel avoids: not only PTSD, but moral injury — the psychic damage of what you saw, what you did, what you couldn’t stop, who you lost, and the feeling that you are no longer the person you were allowed to be.

The Lie We Tell Our Soldiers

We tell our soldiers: Be strong. What we often mean is: Be quiet.

We celebrate resilience but punish vulnerability with social suspicion. We have made “post-trauma” sound like a character flaw, as if a person chooses to wake up choking on a memory. We still whisper about therapy as if it’s an admission of incompetence rather than an act of survival.

And the system, overwhelmed, is built like a maze: Defense Ministry rehabilitation channels, IDF mental health officers, civilian clinics, waiting lists, paperwork, eligibility fights, the exhausting need to advocate for yourself when your mind can barely hold a thought.

This is where organizations like the Jerusalem Institute of Justice are stepping in — not as therapists, but as advocates: people who walk with soldiers through the bureaucracy when the soldier can’t. It’s unglamorous work. It’s also life-saving.
Because prevention is not a slogan. Prevention is access. Prevention is speed.

Prevention is a commander who knows that a soldier who “doesn’t complain” might be the one most at risk. Prevention is the friend who doesn’t accept “I’m fine” as a complete sentence.

What You Can Do Today

You don’t need a ministry budget to save a life. You need a willingness to notice.

Ask directly. “Are you thinking about hurting yourself?” This does not plant the idea. It gives permission to speak.

Take behavioral changes seriously. Rage, numbness, isolation, heavy drinking, reckless driving, giving away possessions, “I won’t be a burden much longer.”

Stay close in the dangerous window. After discharge, after a unit loss, after a round of reserves, after a breakup, after a humiliating encounter with bureaucracy.

Help with logistics. Make the appointment. Drive them there. Sit in the waiting room. Fill out the forms.

Normalize treatment. Therapy is not weakness. It’s a continuation of service: you’re fighting for the life you came back to live.

And yes — donate, volunteer, pressure policymakers. But don’t outsource responsibility to “the system.” The system is made of people. So is rescue.

We are living through a war with multiple fronts. One of them is inside the homes of those who fought. Seventy-six soldiers lost to suicide is not “the price of war.” It is a signal flare. The next one is not inevitable.

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call emergency services right now. If you’re in Israel and need help: ERAN (Emotional First Aid) is available at 1201 (and online chat options exist), and you can also reach Sahar for online support. If you’re in the U.S., call or text 988. If you’re elsewhere, local crises lines can be found via the International Association for Suicide Prevention directory.

The war demanded everything from our soldiers. The least we can do is make sure they are not left to fight alone when they come home.