‘I killed lots of terrorists, but it didn’t make me feel better’: The trauma haunting Israel's elections

The group of Israeli army veterans meets in the departures hall of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. They’re anywhere from 20 to 50 years old, and glad to be back together. They hold one another, laughing, and slap each other on the back.

For a year now, these 18 men have come together to give them a chance to speak, and be heard, and to support one another. Accompanied by a team of psychologists, they are all living with varying degrees of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). At the invitation of donors who have funded the programme, they are all on their way to spend a week in New York.

Most of them have no interest in speaking to the media. But Lior Tapicer, a burly blond man with a broad grin, steps forward and lowers his voice. 

“They’re all crazy, I love them,” he said. “They make me feel less crazy.”

He agrees to tell us his story – that of a young man traumatised by the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, and by months spent fighting alongside his combat unit, looking for revenge in the ruins of the Gaza Strip.

‘I could die at any second’

Twenty-nine years old, Tapicer has been discharged from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and is now working as a naturopath, he said. He says that the trauma that had made him unfit to keep going as an army reservist first took root in him during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attacks.

As reports of the attacks on southern Israel spread, he joined his unit and rushed off to the kibbutzim near the border with the Gaza Strip, where combat with Hamas militants and other Palestinian fighters was still raging.

“They gave me an old rifle, I didn’t even have a combat helmet – we were driving in an open jeep,” he said. “The smell of burnt bodies was everywhere, there were bodies everywhere. It was scary as shit – I remember the feeling of being in my own country, and being afraid that I could die at any second.”  

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The nightmare dragged on into the next night.

“We went into a house – there was shooting, but we were staying silent so they didn’t know we were there”, he said in a detached voice. “And I entered one of the rooms and there was a baby bed, and it was all blood. I won’t describe it.”

A few days later, he entered the Palestinian territory with his combat unit. Having served as a soldier in the Israeli-occupied West Bank since he turned 18, he admits that he was burning for vengeance.

“They attacked us, murdered people, raped,” he said. “To be sincere, when I enlisted the first day, my mind and my body was like, ‘I’m going to kill as many as I can. I’m going to get revenge.’ That’s what I felt in the moment – a lot of hate.”

He broke after four months of fighting. One night, his comrades found him shaking uncontrollably, unable to stand. They decided to have him taken away from the front.

‘I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror’

Although Tapicer was back with his unit 10 days later, he slowly began to realise that his body refused to keep going. 

After a few more months, he was declared unfit for service and returned to civilian life. But his mind and his body were still at war. He was wracked with guilt for having left his comrades, who were still fighting in the densely populated territory. He stopped his work as a personal trainer, and began avoiding his family and friends.

“I didn't recognise myself in the mirror,” he says. “I was half a man. My family, my girlfriend, my friends – you know what is to see somebody you love, and feel no love? You feel empty.”

While he says his symptoms have improved since he started treatment for PTSD, the trauma hasn’t left him. Loud noises, the smell of burning, fights with his girlfriend – many things can set off panic attacks, even if they are growing shorter and shorter.

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According to Gaza’s health ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN, more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s onslaught in Gaza since the October 7 attacks. The Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel killed 1,220 people, with more than 970 Israeli soldiers dying in the subsequent wars launched in Gaza and Lebanon.  

When asked about the human cost of Israel’s war in Gaza, Tapicer said that vengeance was a dead end.

“Today, I understand that it’s a problem you’re not going to solve like that. I killed a lot of terrorists and it didn’t make me feel better. It actually makes me feel worse.”

A heavy toll

Since October 7, the wars that Israel has carried out across the Middle East have taken a heavy toll on its soldiers. In January, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said that there had been a 40 percent increase in cases of PTSD among the army’s ranks since September 2023.

Of the more than 22,000 people treated for war-related injuries, 60 percent struggle with PTSD – a struggle that drives some to try to kill themselves. Last year, a Knesset report found that some 279 soldiers had tried to take their own lives between January 2024 and July 2025.

Last July, the Israeli parliament officially recognised “combat trauma” as a disability linked to service in the country’s armed forces, allowing impacted soldiers to benefit from state-funded treatment.

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In Afula in Israel’s north, the Clalit-HaEmek Medical Centre has been overwhelmed by a non-stop flow of patients suffering from severe psychiatric problems.

Psychiatric services director Alon Reshef said he believed the worst was yet to come.

“When the whole stress comes down, we will see a tsunami of people with all kinds of mental problems – and I think we’re on the verge of it,” he said.

“The waiting list for hospitalisation are getting longer and longer and longer. And not only that, but the cases that we meet are much more complex, much more severe. And it's not only PTSD. If you have a mental health problem, let's say depression or schizophrenia, it's also affected, because all these disorders react to what’s happening in society. The number of forced hospitalisations has risen dramatically. So all the signs show that the mental crisis is not only a problem of the practitioners like me or the patients, but a problem of society – and particularly among those soldiers who fought for a long time in Gaza.”

‘Society in Israel is ill’

Reshef hopes that whatever government emerges from the October 27 elections will take the issue of Israelis’ mental health seriously. 

“Society in Israel is ill,” he said. “It has lots of vital powers, but right now it is sick. Too much hate, too many confrontations. And nobody listens to the other … It will take years to heal.”

His colleague, Ronen Sidi, has begun carrying out the experimental treatment of severe forms of PTSD with MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy. By releasing serotonin and dopamine, this synthetic party drug can help patients work through their trauma, learning to live with the feelings that threaten to overwhelm them.

Sidi, a psychologist specialising in psychedelic treatments, said that the treatments were so far yielding positive results, noting a decrease in the intensity of his patients’ symptoms.

Trauma and resilience

Himself a former member of the special forces, Sidi is all too familiar with the trauma that can follow the savage acts that soldiers are often exposed to. But he said that an army’s cohesion in wartime stemmed first and foremost from the legitimacy of the government that sent it to fight.

“There's a lot of studies about PTSD, but there are also quite a few now about resilience,” he said. “What seems to have a lot to do with resilience is a sense of meaning – if you have a reason to do what you do, you can endure a lot of difficulty.”

For the Israeli reservists who have served for sometimes up to 600 days since the October 7 attacks – up from a baseline of 15 to 20 days a year – this point remains fundamental, he said.

“Three years after the October 7 attacks, and with a government that a lot of people don't agree with what they're doing, a lot more soldiers are saying, ‘I have to fight, it's hard – it might even be less hard than it was two and a half years ago – but what am I doing here? Where is this leading?"

‘I want to get better so I can keep serving my country’

In the port of Jaffa south of the sprawling city of Tel Aviv, Or is enjoying a few days of rest between two stretches of military service. A few months ago, the 32-year-old social worker asked to be treated for PTSD.

Serving as a medic in an infantry unit, he has taken part in several missions in war zones and racked up more than 400 days of military service since October 7. Beer in hand, he says, calmly enough, that he is starting to crack.

“It’s a very long war, every soldier has seen horrible things. Sometimes we feel hate. A few months ago, I asked to be treated for PTSD. Many of my friends are doing the same,” he said. “No one comes through three years of war unscathed. Like a lot of people, I feel in control when I’m in the army, but when I get home, I don’t feel well.”

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His request for treatment came after an experience that left him badly shaken. Four months ago, his combat unit was on patrol when they were surprised by Hamas fighters near a tunnel entrance. The resulting shootout killed one soldier and left several more wounded.

“It was horrible. People told me after that I was screaming, I had lost my mind,” he said. “The soldier who was killed had his face torn off, and it was me who put his body in a jeep. I did everything like a robot, but I remember images, smells.” 

Since then, the young man has continued to undertake stretches of military service, but has been assigned to surveillance rather than frontline combat. He is also seeing a psychotherapist.

“I need to take care of myself. I need to get better so I can keep serving my country,” he said.

‘I don’t want to keep fighting wars’

Like many reservists, Or says that he no longer has confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and its conduct of the war. But as with many Israelis, fear of Hamas rides roughshod over all other considerations.

“I was shocked by the orders that I was given in Gaza, I didn’t think it was the right way to do things. But we had no other choice. We were scared. We knew that Hamas wanted to kill us all, whatever happened, because they hate us. I don’t agree with everything my country has done, especially against civilians, but it’s war,” he said.

“War is bad for Israeli society – it only encourages the extremists,” he added in a resigned tone.

Or doesn’t understand the hostility the rest of the world has towards Israel’s determination to raze the Gaza Strip to the ground, seeing the war in the narrow Palestinian territory as fundamentally defensive in nature. The social worker identifies as a left-wing voter, though he says that the October 7 attacks have shaken his convictions.

He says he hopes that the coming elections will bring about a government that has solutions to the problems facing Israel.

“I don’t want to keep fighting wars,” he said. “I often think that I’ve reached the limits of what I can endure. But they always ask more of me, and I’m able to push those limits back a little further.”