I do not wish PTSD on anyone. It takes living away, leaves torturous survival. But, all Israelis soldiers can choose to say no to torture, killing and crushing kids. I’d not comply with an order to kill others, even if it meant my death.
b@roundsugar Oct 13, 2023:
Later we’ll get pity articles about IDF soldiers on how murdering Palestinians was bad for their mental health.
@jasonhickel 2024:
CNN published a piece today about Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza. One bulldozer driver testifies that they drove over Palestinians, dead and alive, “in the hundreds”. This is genocidal and just breathtakingly evil.
PS, how this gets framed around the psychological trauma of Israeli soldiers and not the victims of genocidal violence is just wild.
@daijoboo:
It’s incredible that these are the people we’re supposed to think are the “good guys.” We are watching the reputation laundering of genocidaires in real time by a purportedly reputable news organization.
@TRyanGregory:
Again, what he saw was himself running over dozens of Palestinians with a bulldozer.
Joe Smith@Joe_Wordsmith:
Even their hate is unoriginal.
That’s a paraphrase of Golda Meir’s cancerous circular rhetoric; a lunatic’s argument for genocide.
“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
Golda Meir
@Eesy20:
The mantra of the abuser. ‘You made me do it!’
@NatalieElsberg:
Dead and alive. The whole story is insane.
@NatalieElsberg:
Won’t somebody please think of the wellbeing of the genocidaires?
Article here, if you want to read about how the IDF soldiers are the real victims because they bulldozed hundreds of people alive.
You can refuse. You do not have to see yourself bulldozing hundreds of Palestinian bodies, some of them still alive.
@peterbrianb:
I doubt there would be such articles about WW2 concentration camp guards. I have the same level of sympathy for both.
@SleimanJO_:
And he still calls everyone he crushed with a bulldozer a “terrorist”. Genuinely deranged
Jehan K@JKhoorshed:
Assasinating children is really bumming him out
‘He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him’: Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide by Nadeen Ebrahim and Mike Schwartz, Oct 21, 2024, CNN
Editor’s note: This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.
A 40-year-old father of four, Eliran Mizrahi deployed to Gaza after the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel resistance (keep in mind that Netanyahu finances Hamas and uses them to his advantage and the IDF admitted to killing many of those that died) on October 7, 2023.
Dr. J.Hawk@jasinskm:
Many of those 1200 were legitimate military targets, actual IDF troops. Many others were killed by IDF itself under Hannibal doctrine. Raping, burning alive, those are figments of Israeli propaganda, long debunked.
The Israeli military reservist returned a different person, traumatized by what he had witnessed in the war against Hamas in the strip, his family told CNN. Six months after he was first sent to fight, he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) back at home. Before he was due to redeploy, he took his own life.
“He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him. And he died after it, because of the post-trauma,” his mother, Jenny Mizrahi, said.He could easily have said no to mass murdering others. Israel’s genocide has been going on for decades. Anyone with a heart can say NO!
The Israeli military has said it is providing care for thousands of soldiers who are suffering from PTSD or mental illnesses caused by trauma duringIsrael’s genocide the war. It is unclear how many have taken their own lives, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has not provided an official figure.
One year on, Israel’s war in Gaza has killed more than 42,000 peoplemost likely many more dead not yet found, likely never to be found, according to the health ministry in the strip, with the United Nations reporting that most of the dead are women and children.
The war, launched after Hamas killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage, is already Israel’s longest since the Jewish state was established. Israel’s genocide has been ongoing for decades and not just in the West Bank and Gaza. Occupied Palestinians have the right to resist being wiped out by Israel’s brutal killing, stealing and lying regime.And as it now expands to Lebanon, some soldiers say they dread being drafted into yet another conflict.Then gather your courage and say NO. Say it loudly, publicly and en mass.
“A lot of us are very scared of getting drafted again to a war in Lebanon,” an IDF medic who served four months in Gaza told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. “A lot of us don’t trust the government right now.”If that’s how Israeli soldiers feel, think how the genocided feel, and not just in Palestine. Israel is an evil out of control killing machine.
Israeli authorities – with rare exceptions – have closed off Gaza to foreign journalists unless under IDF escort, making it difficult to capture the full extent of Palestinian suffering or the experiences of soldiers there. Israeli soldiers who fought in the enclave told CNN they witnessed horrors the outside world can never truly comprehend.I do not feel in any way sorry for the Israeli mass murderers, rapists, torturers and thieves. Each individual Israeli can say no. Their accounts offer a rare glimpse into the brutality of what critics have called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “forever war,” and the intangible toll it takes on the soldiers who participate.Oh lordy, the poor poor killers! Imagine the toll taken on the families of the dead Palestinian poets, doctors, nurses, students, professors, artists, scholars, musicians, cooks, bakers, farmers, olive grove owners, water engineers, first responders, museum curators, teachers and more. In some cases, all family members but one baby were murdered.
For many soldiers, the war in Gaza is a fight for Israel’s survival and must be won by any means.FFS! What bullshit reporting is this CNN?! Israel is the occupier, it has all the power, Palestinians have none. The IDF known this. But the battle is also taking a mental toll that, due to stigma, is largely hidden from view. Interviews with Israeli soldiers, a medic, and the family of Mizrahi, the reservist who took his own life, provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society.I have not read a more vile propaganda piece than this, and I am only part way through. It screams Zionism.
Bulldozing ‘terrorists, dead and alive’
Mizrahi deployed to Gaza on October 8 last year and was tasked with driving a D-9 bulldozer, a 62-ton armored vehicle that can withstand bullets and explosives.
He was a civilian for most of his life, working as a manager at an Israeli construction company. After witnessing the massacres committed by Hamasand IDF, he felt the need to fight, Jenny told CNN.
The reservist spent 186 days in the enclave until he sustained injuries to his knee, followed by hearing damage in February when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) struck his vehicle, his family said. He was pulled out of Gaza for treatment, and in April was diagnosed with PTSD, receiving weekly talk therapy.How privileged and lucky he was. Palestinians get blown headless or snipped dead if they dare seek treatment after Israel blows them up or burns them in their tents for homes, schools, refugee camps, hospitals … Palestinians get no weekly chat sessions, never mind food, water, shelter.
His treatment did not help.Of course it didn’t. The crimes he engaged in would do in any human, or render them robotic.
“They didn’t know how to treat them (soldiers),” Jenny, who lives in the Israeli Ma’ale Adumim settlement, in the occupied West Bank, said. “They (soldiers) said the war was so different. They saw things that were never seen in Israel.”Of course not! Israel takes the cake when it comes to cruelty, genocide, and theft. And, Israel will never be satisfied. It will keep killing far beyond the Middle East, as long as USA and others keep feeding the murder machine bombs and money with which to develop and trial their spy/surveillance/tracking tech, including that supplied by evil Herr Harper’s firm.
When Mizrahi was on leave, he suffered from bouts of anger, sweating, insomnia and social withdrawal, his family said. He told his family that only those who were in Gaza with him could understand what he was going through.
“He always said, no one will understand what I saw,” his sister, Shir, told CNN.
Jenny wondered if her son killed someone and couldn’t handle it.
“He saw a lot of people die. Maybe he even killed someone. (But) we don’t teach our children to do things like this,” she said. “So, when he did this, something like this, maybe it was a shock for him.”
Guy Zaken, Mizrahi’s friend and co-driver of the bulldozer, provided further insight into their experience in Gaza. “We saw very, very, very difficult things,” Zaken told CNN. “Things that are difficult to accept.”
The former soldier has spoken publicly about the psychological trauma endured by Israeli troops in Gaza. In a testimony to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”
“Everything squirts out,” he added.
Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza, and struggles to sleep at night, the sound of explosions ringing in his head.
“When you see a lot of meat outside, and blood… both ours and theirs (Hamas), then it really affects you when you eat,” he told CNN, referring to bodies as “meat.”
He maintains that the vast majority of those he encountered were “terrorists.”
“The civilians we saw, we stopped and brought them water to drink, and we let them eat from our food,” he recalled, I don’t believe that adding that even in such situations, Hamas fighters would shoot at them.
“So, there is no such thing as citizens,” he said, referring to the ability of Hamas fighters to blend with civilians. “This is terrorism.”
When soldiers do encounter civilians, however, many face a moral dilemma, according to the IDF medic who spoke to CNN anonymously.
There was a “very strong collective attitude” of distrust among Israeli soldiers toward the Palestinians in Gaza, especially at the outset of the war, the medic said.
There was a notion that Gazans, including civilians, “are bad, that they support Hamas, that they help Hamas, that they were hiding ammunition,” the medic said.
In the field, however, some of these attitudes changed “when you actually see Gazan civilians in front of your eyes,” they said.
The IDF has said that it does all it can to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza, including by sending text messages, making phone calls, and dropping evacuation leaflets to warn civilians ahead of attacks.LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR. IDF are not God’s chosen people, IDF are god awful liars. Their own statements and boastful videos prove it.
Despite this, civilians in Gaza have been repeatedly killed in large numbers, including when sheltering in areas the military itself has designated as “safe zones.”
The mental health toll in Gaza is likely to be enormous.Oh, CNN, you disgusting inhumane Zionism enabling fuckers.Relief groups and the UN have repeatedly highlighted the catastrophic mental health consequences of the war on civilians in Gaza, many of whom had already been scarred by a 17-year blockade and several decades of genocide by wars with Israel.
In an August report, the UN said the experiences of Gazans defy “traditional biomedical definitions” of PTSD, “given that there is no ‘post’ in Gaza’s context.”
After Mizrahi took his own life, videos and photos surfaced on social media of the reservist bulldozing homes and buildings in Gaza and posing in front of vandalized structures. Some of the images, which were purportedly posted on his now removed social media accounts, appeared in a documentary that he was interviewed for on Israel’s Channel 13.
His sister, Shir, said she saw a lot of comments on social media accusing Mizrahi of being “a murderer,” cursing at him and replying with unpleasant emojis.
“It was hard,” she said, adding that she tried her best to overlook it. “I know he had a good heart.”Not good enough. Had he said no, he would have proven he had a good heart.
Clearing dead people with debris
2013 cartoon by Gerald Scarf for Sunday Times of Genocide Bibi Netanyahu building his wall.
Ahron Bregman, a political scientist at King’s College London who served in the Israeli army for six years, including during the 1982 Lebanon War, said the Gaza war is unlike any other fought by Israel.
“It’s very long,” he said, and it is urban, which means soldiers fight among many people, “the vast majority of them are civilians.”
Bulldozer operators are among those who are most directly exposed to the war’s brutality, Bregman said. “What they see is dead people, and they clear them (along) with the debris,” he told CNN. “They go over them.”
For many, the transition from the battlefield back to civilian life can be overwhelming, especially after urban warfare that involves the deaths of women and children, Bregman said.
“How can you put your children to bed when, you know, you saw children killedand killed many children intentionally, including babiesin Gaza?”
Despite Mizrahi’s PTSD, his family said he agreed to return to Gaza when he was called up again. Two days before he was meant to re-deploy, he killed himself.
In her home, Jenny has dedicated a room to memorialize her late son, with photos from his childhood and working in construction. Among the objects his mother has kept was the cap Mizrahi was wearing when he shot himself in the head, the bullet holes clearly visible.
Mizrahi’s family started speaking out about his death after the IDF did not grant him a military burial, saying he had not been “in active reserve duty.” They later reversed their decision.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that 10 soldiers took their own lives between October 7 and May 11, according to military data obtained by the newspaper.
Asked by CNN about the number of suicides in the IDF since the war, Uzi Bechor, a psychologist and commander of the IDF’s Combat Response Unit, said the medical corps is not allowed to provide a figure, and the military sees the suicide rate as largely unchanged.
“The suicide rate in the army is more or less stable in the last five or six years,” Bechor said, noting that it has in fact been falling over the past 10 years.
Even if the number of suicides is higher, he said, the ratio so far “is quite the same from the previous year because we have more soldiers.”
“It doesn’t mean that there is a trend of more suicide,” Bechor told CNN.
He didn’t provide CNN with the number of suicides or their rate. “Every case for us is heartbreaking,” he said.Imagine the horrors those surviving – so far – Israel’s genocide are enduring! Surviving so far, knowing Israel, USA and other Zionist run racist nations including Canada are running extermination of Palestinians.
Still, more than a third of those removed from combat are found to have mental health issues. In a statement in August, the Israeli defense ministry’s rehabilitation division said that every month, more than 1,000 new wounded soldiers are removed from fighting for treatment, 35% of whom complain about their mental state, with 27% developing “a mental reaction or post-traumatic stress disorder.”
It added that by the end of the year, 14,000 wounded fighters will likely be admitted for treatment, approximately 40% of whom are expected to face mental health issues.
@owenjonesjourno:
The Western media is running actual pieces encouraging us to feel sorry for Israeli soldiers traumatised because they killed literally countless living breathing human beings by running over them with a bulldozer
@thickyrubio:
CNN tried to do a sympathy piece on IDF soldiers and then like halfway through the article you find out this guy was a D9 bulldozer driver who regularly drove over people while they were alive.
How to get help
Help is available if you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters.
In the US: Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world.
More than 500 people die by suicide in Israel and over 6,000 others attempt suicide every year, according to the country’s ministry of health, which notes that “there is under-reporting of approximately 23% in the numbers mentioned.”
In 2021, suicide was the leading cause of death among IDF soldiers, the Times of Israel reported, citing military data that showed at least 11 soldiers had taken their own lives that year.
Earlier this year, the ministry of health sought to “debunk rumors of rising suicide rates since October 7,” saying that the reported cases are “isolated incidents in the media and in social media.” Without providing numbers, the ministry said that there was a “decrease in suicide in Israel between October and December in comparison with the same months in recent years.”
Bregman, the Lebanon war veteran, said that PTSD and other mental health issues are now easier to talk about than in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to the diminishing stigma. Still, he said, the soldiers coming out of Gaza will “carry (their experiences) for the rest of their lives.”
The IDF medic who spoke to CNN said that there is a mental health officer designated to every unit of the army during and after deployment. The impact of the war nonetheless persists, the medic said, with soldiers as young as 18 suffering from mental trauma in Gaza. They would often cry or would appear emotionally numb, the medic added.
Normalizing the abnormal
Bechor, the IDF psychologist, said that one of the ways the military helps traumatized troops resume their lives is to try to “normalize” what they went through, partly by reminding them of the horrors committed on October 7including by IDF murdering its own citizens via Israel’s Hannibal Directive.
“This situation is not normal for human beings,” Bechor said, adding that when soldiers come back from the battlefield with PTSD symptoms, they ask: “How do I get back home after what I saw? How do I get to engage with my kids after what I saw?”Your kids get to live; Palestinian kids and kids elsewhere being murdered by Israel/Zionism under fabrication of “terrorists are everywhere” do not get to live.
“We try to normalize it and to help them remember their values and why did they go there (to Gaza),” he told CNN.
For the tens of thousands of Israelis who volunteered or were called up to fight, the war in Gaza was seen not only seen as an act of self-defense but as an existential battle. That notion was touted by top Israeli political and military leaders, as well as Israel’s international allies.
Netanyahu has described Hamas as “the new Nazis” and US President Joe Biden has said that the “ancient hatred of Jews” endorsed by the Nazis was “brought back to life” on October 7.Both Bibi and Bibi Biden have proven themselves liars.
The external threats to their country unified many Israelis, putting on hold domestic political squabbling that had for months divided society. Meanwhile, the suffering of Palestinians has largely been absent from Israeli television screens, which are dominated by news about the hostages in Gaza.
After the Hamas attacks, polls showed that most Israelis supported the war in Gaza, and did not want their government to halt the fighting even while negotiating to release the kidnapped hostages. On the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attack, a survey published by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only 6% of Israelis think the war in Gaza should be stopped due to the “the great cost in human life.”
Some soldiers, however, couldn’t rationalize the horrors they had seen.
When he returned from Gaza, Mizrahi often told his family that he felt “invisible blood” coming out of him, his mother said.
Shir, his sister, blames the war for her brother’s death. “Because of the army, because of this war, my brother is not here,” she said. “Maybe he didn’t die from a bullet (in combat) or an RPG, but he died from an invisible bullet,” she added, referring to his psychological pain.He could have said no.
@mehdirhasan:
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing” – Malcolm X
@malsaafin:
CNN prefaces the article with a warning: “Editor’s note: This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
You the reader are expected to find the trauma of the soldier who said he killed 100s of Palestinians more upsetting than his actual murders.
@PrideJoy327275:
The suicide that’s upsetting, not the hundreds that of people which we know included hundreds of hospital patients that were evacuated only to get ran over by Israeli bulldozers.
@Desygn4D:
Yes but ofcourse.
The trauma of the Israeli soldier is much more important then the hundreds of kids he bulldozed over and flattened while alive.
@Opethism:
They’re really taking the piss, aren’t they? Who’s the sociopathic deranged “editor”?
@Fundmasstransit:
Why did this make me so incredibly angry? I’m fuming.
It’s so dehumanizing to the victims of this genocide, like their suffering and incomprehensible horror doesn’t matter because they’re Palestinians. That’s @CNN’s editorial position
@CptLeto:
It‘s choking… For what we saw/heard from the victims‘ side months ago, even an adequate content warning was beyond „upsetting“.
I can‘t begin to imagine how the blatant dehumanizing disregard must feel for survivors/kin/Palestinians in general.
@hamzarazzaq009:
The article tries to evoke sympathy for someone who drives a bulldozer over living people. It’s not just insensitive; it’s a betrayal of the victims whose lives are disregarded in the pursuit of a ‘balanced’ narrative.
@jasinskm:
Remarkable that the “editor” felt compelled to tell us we should be traumatized by these peoples’ suicides, not by what they did to Palestinians.
@PoultryChamp:
IDF soldiers can always say no. Refuse the assignment, defect if necessary.
“But they’ll put me in jail!”
You can always say no.
“But my peers won’t respect me!”
You can always say no.
You can always say no.
@MichiganDeb1:
I think it is important to include “Caterpillar” in front of every reference to D9. The Caterpillar D9 is designed & manufactured in the USA.
@RegLee7:
Cry me a river – crocodile tears of psychotic monsters.
Consolation – they are filming their own genocidal acts and posting on YouTube.
No Israeli can claim they never knew.
What is Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? PTSD is a mental health condition caused by very stressful, frightening or distressing events, according to the UK National Health Service. Someone with PTSD often relives the traumatic event through nightmares and flashbacks, and may experience feelings of isolation, irritability and guilt. PTSD can develop immediately after someone experiences a disturbing event, or it can occur weeks, months or even years later.
***
@jackmac50684612:
This article exposes the real culprit and chief instigator of this horrific crime against humanity, yet again it is to be found in Washinton, with the west all too eager to participate, now nowhere in the world is safe from them. they are the real terrorist.
Citizens for Justice@cfor_justice:
It isn’t just destroying the world, it burns everyone with conscious from inside out. No one witnessing Israelis genocide on Palestinians in impunity will never be the same. The wounds will never heal and the lost Palestinians lives will never be forgotten or forgiven.
@Heaney20Heaney:
Excellent article exposing the horrors and horrific truth of the Israeli genocide in the region. By its actions over the last 50+ years it has shown itself to be the very definition of evil, and it’s Western enablers are left with zero credibility.
@amirabdelhedi79:
The impunity of the terrorist state of Israel is giving real dictators some ideas since mass murder is not a crime anymore and don’t expect sanctions
@TRyanGregory:
Overt calls for ethnic cleansing from a top government official.
2024 10 21: At conference calling to resettle Gaza, Israel’s police minister Ben-Gvir says