Israeli soldiers recount trauma of Gaza war

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

******** soldiers recount trauma of Gaza war

When a grenade shredded his leg during a ******** rescue mission in Gaza, ******** soldier Barak wanted to ****** himself to avoid being taken captive by ************ militants.

But it’s the sound of the grenade exploding that haunts him months later.

“The grenade blew up right next to me,” the 32-year-old from the northern ******** town of Acre told AFP.

Barak, who did not wish to disclose his last name to maintain his privacy, was wounded in December in the central Gaza Strip, and has spent the last seven months recovering in hospital.

Like many ******** soldiers who fought in Gaza, he has been battling physical ailments as much as psychological ones, all of which he traces back to that moment.

“It’s all about this big ***** that takes you… from being completely sharp… to being all broken and about to ****,” he told AFP.

“You hear it, you smell it with the lead,” he said, describing regular nightmares afterwards.

He too threw a grenade at the ************ fighters who were ********* at him.

It was at that point Barak, a tech entrepreneur until October 7, thought of ********* himself.

“I was trying to reach for my *******… in order to ****** myself because all I had in mind at that point was that if they took me in this situation, that’s not going to be good for me,” he said from his hospital bed in Tel Aviv.

He did not manage to reach his ******* due to heavy blood loss which caused him to lose consciousness, only awakening seven days later.

“I was about to ****… and then I woke up to a lot of pain,” said Barak, who loved running before the firefight that caused his ankle bones to fuse together due to a lingering bullet.

His nightmares were amplified by persistent tinnitus, and he described being in a state of “shock all the time”.

– Symptoms for years –

Einav Ben Hur, head of social services for the ******** defence ministry in Tel Aviv, has seen the number of cases like Barak’s soar since the start of the war in Gaza.

“I think it is important to provide treatment because we know that the symptoms of this can continue for years,” she said, adding that in many cases “soldiers don’t remember what they’ve been through, they remember (something like) a smell,” a noise or an image.

From her Tel Aviv office where she coordinates psychological treatment for soldiers, she told AFP “this is part of the damage that war causes”.

“War wounds the human soul. I don’t think the army can avoid that,” she said.

The ******* Trauma and Resiliency Center, which runs a defence ministry mental health helpline, has seen requests soar among soldiers and their families since ******’s unprecedented ******* on October 7.

The ******* resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people in *******, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of ******** figures.

At least 39,175 Palestinians have been ******* in *******’s military campaign in Gaza since the war began, according to the ******-run territory’s health ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths.

According to the ******** military 327 soldiers have been ******* in the Gaza military campaign since the start of the ground offensive on October 27.

Ben Hur said soldiers who lose comrades in arms are most affected, and army units where people **** “is where you have the most trauma”.

“We know that soldiers had to pick up their friend’s pieces” who were blown up, she said.

“The sight of a ***** body… with missing organs from the body, the smell of ******, that’s what they say is very hard for them,” she said.

– ‘Just want to live’ –

On October 7, Barak had originally driven towards the Nova festival, which three of his brothers had been attending, and where hundreds of festivalgoers were ultimately *******.

On the way there, he was reassigned to Beeri, at the border with Gaza, which had been overrun by hundreds of ************ militants.

“All the things that were on Telegram, in the news, I saw them with my eyes,” he said, describing the images as “gruesome”.

Saar Ram, a reservist who led a tank unit in Gaza, had his skull broken when ************ fighters sprang out of tunnels to ambush his unit.

But the 29-year-old’s most vivid memory of that day is of what happened to his friends.

“I went there after to look at the tanks, the burned tanks… there were friends of mine who ***** there, but this (image) of the tank, the burned tank, it’s something I will never forget,” he told AFP.

Ben Hur did not specifically mention ******** people, armed or not, as a cause for trauma.

But Barak, while discreet on his own experience, said there must be a toll.

“You can’t stay balanced if you ***** someone. It doesn’t matter if it’s for the right reason or not,” he said.

For now, he has no plans to return to the tech company he founded before the war.

“I have no ambitions in life now, nothing at all… I just want to live”.

lba-sha/jd/jsa/kir

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#******** #soldiers #recount #trauma #Gaza #war

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up