In March 2025, a young Israeli combat soldier stood inside the Knesset and delivered a warning that, at the time, may have sounded like the desperate words of a man in personal crisis, but which, one year later, reads as something far more significant and disturbingly accurate.
“If you don’t provide support,” he told lawmakers, “there will be suicides.”
Today, that warning has taken on a new and deeply troubling meaning.
Reporting published on January 16, 2026 by Reuters has confirmed a sharp escalation in psychological trauma among Israeli troops following the war in Gaza, with post-traumatic stress cases rising by nearly 40 percent since 2023 and projections suggesting a further increase of 180 percent by 2028. The same report found that of more than 22,300 soldiers receiving treatment for war-related injuries, around 60 percent were suffering from psychological trauma, while 279 soldiers attempted suicide between January 2024 and July 2025. The situation was described in stark terms, with Israel’s mental health system said to be “overwhelmed completely.”
Against that backdrop, the testimony of Israel Hayat, a 21-year-old combat veteran from the Golani Brigade, now appears not as an isolated breakdown, but as an early and unheeded warning from inside a military system under mounting psychological strain.
His appearance before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on March 9, 2025, transformed what had been a routine political discussion into a moment of raw human exposure, as the reality of war surfaced in the form of a soldier who said he could no longer live with what he had experienced.
“I am a walking corpse”
What unfolded that day was not a conventional speech, nor even a structured testimony, but rather a stream of anguish delivered without restraint, in which Hayat attempted to articulate the psychological damage he said had been inflicted on him during his service in Gaza.
Using the full transcript provided, his words read as follows:
“Treat me, treat us. Soldiers are coming out of Gaza now.
I’m a 21-year-old kid, and if you ask me what my best dream is, it’s to get a bullet between the eyes.
I am a walking corpse. I am a person who is not living.I want to ask you something. I’m also a trauma victim from the Iron Swords war, Golani.
Do you know what it means to lift the bodies of your friends?
Friends you were just sitting with, eating with, sleeping with, doing basic training with,
and a moment later they explode in front of your eyes?Three friends of ours committed suicide three days ago.
A few months ago I injected myself with three grams of fentanyl because I couldn’t bear it anymore.
I couldn’t handle it. I see bodies in front of my eyes now.
When I sit at night, I see bodies just like I see you now.
I see my friends exploding in front of my eyes.Why am I supposed to carry this?
Why am I supposed to endure all this?
Why am I supposed to try to kill myself every day?
I look at this ruined country.
Treat me. Treat us. Soldiers are coming out of Gaza now.”
The testimony was marked by its immediacy and its physicality, rooted not in abstract political language but in the lived experience of close combat, the loss of comrades, and the persistent psychological imprint of violence. Hayat described carrying the bodies of friends, witnessing their deaths at close range, and reliving those moments repeatedly, particularly at night, when the memories returned with undiminished intensity.
The battlefield and the mind
The Golani Brigade, in which Hayat served, is one of Israel’s primary frontline infantry units and has been repeatedly deployed in Gaza, where soldiers operate in densely populated urban environments characterised by close-quarters combat, constant threat, and profound uncertainty. In such conditions, the boundary between combatant and civilian is frequently blurred, decisions are made in fractions of a second, and the psychological burden accumulates rapidly, often in ways that are not immediately visible but become deeply embedded over time.
These are precisely the circumstances most closely associated with severe post-traumatic stress and what psychologists increasingly identify as moral injury, a form of trauma that arises not only from fear and danger but from the moral and psychological weight of actions taken, witnessed, or endured during conflict.
By the time Hayat spoke in March 2025, there were already signs that the war in Gaza was producing widespread psychological damage among Israeli soldiers, but in the months that followed, the scale of the problem became far more apparent.
By May 27, 2025, it had been reported that more than 50,000 children in Gaza had been killed or injured since the start of the war, highlighting the scale of devastation inflicted on the civilian population, while the overall death toll among Palestinians had reached into the tens of thousands, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, alongside the destruction of entire neighbourhoods and critical infrastructure.
By July 10, 2025, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee was debating whether soldiers suffering from PTSD could be called up for reserve duty, a discussion that illustrated how the psychological consequences of the war were beginning to intersect directly with military policy and operational readiness.
By January 16, 2026, the situation had escalated further, with reporting confirming a sharp rise in PTSD cases across the Israeli military and a system struggling to cope with the volume of those requiring care.
By February 9, 2026, Israel’s Defense Ministry acknowledged before the Knesset Health Committee that it faced a severe shortage of mental health professionals, with approximately one caseworker responsible for every 850 veterans suffering from PTSD, a ratio that underscored the extent to which the system was under strain.
At the same time, international scrutiny of the war intensified, and on February 19, 2026, the UN human rights office raised grave concerns regarding the scale and pattern of civilian killings in Gaza, warning that Israeli actions could constitute war crimes and raising concerns about conditions that could amount to ethnic cleansing.
The absence at the heart of the testimony
Within this broader context, Hayat’s testimony takes on a more complex and troubling significance.
His speech is saturated with anguish, fear, anger, and despair, and it provides a stark account of the psychological toll that combat can exact on those who experience it directly. He speaks of suicide, of self-harm, of an inability to function, and of a mind that remains trapped in the moment of violence long after the event itself has passed.
Yet there is also a notable absence within his words.
At no point in his outburst does Hayat express remorse or compassion for Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza, nor does he acknowledge the human cost borne by the population among whom he fought. There is no reference to the thousands of children killed or injured, no reflection on the destruction of civilian life, and no recognition of the wider consequences of the military campaign in which he participated.
His suffering is articulated entirely through the lens of Israeli experience.
This absence is not incidental, but rather indicative of a deeper asymmetry that lies at the heart of the conflict, in which the trauma experienced by soldiers exists alongside, and is inseparable from, the far greater scale of devastation inflicted upon civilians.
A crisis unfolding in stages
The sequence of events over the past year forms a coherent and deeply concerning narrative.
In March 2025, a soldier breaks down in parliament and warns of suicides if support is not provided. By May 2025, tens of thousands of children are reported killed or injured in Gaza, as the war reaches devastating levels of intensity. By July 2025, lawmakers are already debating the implications of deploying traumatised soldiers back into service. By January 2026, the scale of psychological injury within the military has surged, and the system tasked with addressing it is described as overwhelmed. By February 2026, the state itself acknowledges that it lacks the capacity to adequately treat those affected, even as international bodies raise concerns about the legality and human cost of the war.
Taken together, these developments do not represent isolated incidents, but rather successive stages of the same unfolding crisis, one that encompasses both the internal consequences of war for those who fight it and the external devastation inflicted on those who endure it.
A warning that still stands
In the end, Hayat’s plea was disarmingly simple, stripped of rhetoric and reduced to a single demand for recognition and care.
“Treat me. Treat us.”
At the time, those words sounded like a cry for help from an individual in distress, but one year later, they resonate as a warning that has already begun to materialise, reflecting a reality in which the psychological consequences of war continue to unfold long after the fighting has subsided, shaping the lives of those who return from the battlefield and casting a long shadow over the societies to which they return.
