When your son is risking his life fighting in Gaza, you don’t expect to hear news that he’s been killed during a rest period at home.
Eliran Mizrahi had served 187 days as a reservist in Gaza since 8 October, before he died by suicide in June of the previous year.
His mother Jenny has turned Eliran’s childhood bedroom into a shrine. The 40-year-old’s combat vest hanging on the wall still has sand in it from Gaza.
Eliran served 187 days as a reservist
The cap he was wearing when he died, sits just above it on a shelf laden with memories of his life.
Israel is witnessing a wave of soldiers like Eliran taking their own lives – five died by suicide just last month.
IDF (Israel Defence Forces) investigations have found it is what they have seen and done in Gaza that is the cause, according to reports by the Israeli public broadcaster.
Eliran’s mother told Sky News her son returned from Gaza a changed man, and she fears there will be many more suicides among Israeli soldiers.
“He never left Gaza in his mind,” says Jenny.
“When he came back, he couldn’t go back to work. He was a great father with a lot of patience. And he lost his patience with his children, with people.
“He was very silent. He didn’t sleep at night, he had nightmares. We didn’t know anything about it. He didn’t speak. Whenever we asked him, he said everything is okay.”
Jenny Mizrahi
Jenny describes Eliran as someone who was happy and friends with everyone. A father of four “with a big heart” and a big smile. But his experience of the war “injured his soul.”
Initially, he was deployed to clear bodies of people slaughtered by Hamas at the Nova Festival on 7 October, and then deployed to Gaza a day later.
Eliran was active on social media and shared videos of his time in Gaza. He was commander of a unit of D9 bulldozers that destroyed buildings and tunnel shafts.
After his death, his D9 partner, Guy Zaken, told a parliamentary committee they were often shot at and they ran over hundreds of bodies.
Eliran posted TikTok videos showing him bulldozing Gaza buildings
Yet they filmed themselves smiling and singing to send to their families. Eliran shared some of those videos on social media.
Israel has levelled vast parts of Gaza. Eliran’s actions were part of a systematic campaign the UN says has damaged or destroyed over 90% of Gaza’s homes. Human rights experts warn this could be a war crime.
Eliran was pulled out of Gaza after he sustained knee injuries in an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) attack on his bulldozer.
‘The bodies and the blood’
He was later diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) – we don’t know the cause of his trauma, but in the end, he couldn’t live with it. Two days before he was due to return to active duty, he took his own life.
“What he saw over there in Gaza injured his soul. You see all the bodies over there and all the blood. It hurts your soul,” says Eliran’s mother.
Israeli media is reporting at least 18 soldiers have taken their own lives so far this year.
Thousands are suffering with PTSD. And more and more reservists are quietly refusing to turn up for duty.
The IDF says supporting its service members is a top priority and it invests significant resources in doing so, including deploying mental health officers in all military units.
Tuly Flint was one of those officers. A clinical social worker and expert in trauma therapy in his professional life, and a lieutenant colonel in the military reserves, he was deployed to offer psychological support to troops who served in Gaza.
Last year, after treating many soldiers and becoming exposed to the extreme suffering of Gazans, Tuly came to the conclusion the war had no purpose and it was a crime against humanity. So he refused to continue to serve in the IDF.
“At the beginning of the war what we usually saw was simple PTSD. People who talk about the horrors they saw in the first few weeks with the massacre of Hamas,” says Tuly.
“But since the second month of the war, people started talking about what takes place on the Palestinian side.
“Even people that were not talking about Palestinians’ rights, or anything like that, they started talking about the fact that they saw bodies of children, of old people, of women.”
‘You think, are they lying to me’
I asked Tuly how soldiers feel hearing Benjamin Netanyahu‘s narrative that there is no starvation in Gaza – that the images we see are a lie.
The Israeli military bears witness to what is happening in Gaza in a way most of the world, including international journalists, still can’t.
“When you hear your government and your commanders telling things that are not true, you start thinking, are they lying to me also?” says Tuly.
“When you hear your prime minister lying about things that you saw in Gaza, things that you did… people talk about torching houses, people talk about a ‘deadline’ – not a metaphor – a deadline when people cross they will be killed no matter if they are children or women… they see people starving and they also see the chaos.”
