Military Suicides in Israel Climb to Fifteen-Year High
At least 10 active-duty soldiers have taken their own lives since January 2026, six of them in April alone. Three reservists who completed their wartime service also died by suicide this month, as did two police officers, among them a conscripted Border Police officer.
According to the newspaper, the data "points to a continued rise in suicides within the defense establishment," a trend traceable to the outbreak of the Gaza war in October 2023. Before the conflict, the annual average hovered around 12 deaths. That figure rose to seven in the final months of 2023 alone, then surged to 21 in 2024 and 22 in 2025 — the highest annual toll recorded in 15 years.
A senior official within the Israeli army's Manpower Directorate conceded the military had badly misjudged the scale of the crisis, saying: "At the beginning of the war, we thought we had the situation under control … and it blew up in our faces."
Military sources attributed the deterioration to prolonged combat exposure and the mounting psychological weight placed on a relatively limited pool of service members. Some officials attempted to connect April's spike to Memorial Day commemorations and the intensified focus on loss and grief — a theory mental health professionals largely rejected, noting no comparable pattern in prior years.
Activists supporting soldiers with combat-related psychological wounds told the newspaper that the actual scale of mental health provision has contracted, "despite the army's public claims to the contrary." They pointed specifically to the cancellation earlier this year of psychological debriefing sessions for reservists transitioning back to civilian life — a program only partially restored following backlash.
Soldiers themselves have spoken out. "It's simply irresponsible to send us home like this," one said, condemning the absence of meaningful post-deployment support. Reserve mental health officers echoed those concerns, with one warning that even when debriefings do occur, they are woefully inadequate — describing the current approach as "a bit like putting a band aid on a bleeding main artery."
The report also documented a shrinking presence of mental health professionals in active combat zones, with some troops reporting zero contact with any mental health specialist even after direct involvement in combat operations in southern Lebanon. In documented cases, commanders pushed soldiers showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder back into service and actively blocked them from seeking care — driven partly by chronic manpower shortfalls, and in some instances, by entrenched stigma around psychological treatment.
A former head of the clinical mental health branch within the Israeli army issued a stark warning, saying "at least some of them could have been saved if commanders had paid attention to warning signs," before adding: "This is no longer just a warning. It is a real alarm."
The figures disclosed by the newspaper are also likely an undercount. Deaths by suicide among veterans who have already completed their service are excluded from the tallies, and the military only recently began acknowledging such cases following sustained media and public pressure.
Those affected include reservists who served extended rotations in Gaza and were later diagnosed with PTSD, as well as drone operators and intelligence personnel reported to have struggled profoundly with the psychological demands of their roles.
The Israeli army, in an official response, said it regards mental health as "an integral part of its responsibility," stating that it has broadened its mental health infrastructure, brought on hundreds of additional professionals, and deployed them across operational sectors since the war began. The military added that emotional support and debriefing services are being provided to "tens of thousands" of personnel and that every suicide is individually reviewed to inform future policy.
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