The curious case of Eliran Mizrahi, the Israeli soldier who killed himself after wreaking havoc in Gaza

And why it is a dangerous omen for the genocidal Israeli state.

On June 9, social media accounts dedicated to sharing updates about the Palestinian resistance were abuzz with the news of an Israeli Occupation Forces soldier named Eliran Mizrahi. They reported that Mizrahi had committed suicide after suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following his deployment in Gaza. As a confirmation, those accounts also shared a farewell message from Mizrahi’s wife for her dead husband via screenshot of an Instagram story. Curiously, there was no news concerning Mizrahi in the English language Israeli news websites. (The Hebrew news outlets are more frank in their reporting than their English counterparts.)

It was only a day later that news of Mizrahi’s death began to surface in the English language Israeli media. They reported that the reservist had spent seven months in Gaza and suffered a mental breakdown after returning home. He killed himself two days after being ordered to get back to Gaza.

As has been the case over the last eight months with the Israeli terrorists in Gaza, Mizrahi’s own Instagram account documented his misdeeds in the strip. He proudly posted pictures of himself wreaking havoc in the strip, laying waste to civilian infrastructure, and posing for photos with names of his loved ones scrawled across the walls of demolished Palestinian homes, presumably of his own doing.

One of the videos posted on his Instagram (attached below) shows the demolition of a Gazan home from the viewpoint of a bulldozer operator. It is safe to assume Mizrahi was in the driver’s seat of that bulldozer.

About the circumstances surrounding his death, The Times of Israel collated reports from numerous Hebrew outlets to string together its story. It reported:

According to Channel 12 news, Mizrahi was recognized as a disabled IDF veteran and diagnosed with PTSD, but received an order on Friday [June 7] to report for duty in Rafah two days later. He then took his own life.

His mother told the Israeli media that after his stint in Gaza, Mizrahi was a changed man:

“He was the leading light in our home and among his friends, and he came home different. We got back a broken man who was impatient with the kids. He was angry, and he had nightmares.”

She also told the media how committed he was to “protecting the country”:

Mizrahi’s mother, Jenny, told Kan that he was injured twice during the seven months he was on duty, but that he refused to leave Gaza the first time he was wounded, insisting he wanted to continue protecting the country.

But despite his self-documented “valour” on the killing fields of Gaza, the Israeli army refused to honour Mizrahi as a soldier after his passing and now the Mizrahi family desperately wants him to be buried in a military cemetery with military honours, befitting a war criminal like him:

Eliran’s family has been fighting to get him recognized as a fallen soldier and have him buried in the military cemetery at Mount Herzl, but the IDF has refused the request because he was not on active duty when he died.

But the Mizrahis are an insistent lot:

“Sending him off to war with his friends is okay, but recognizing him as a fallen soldier isn’t? Why?” she said, adding that she refused to bury him if it wasn’t in a military cemetery.

Eliran’s sister, Shir, told Channel 12 that he had lost his soul to the war.

“The man gave his life to this country and our army, and he doesn’t deserve military burial? Instead of focusing on our grief, we’re forced to fight for his honor,” she said.

“My brother deserves to be buried with an Israeli flag and to have soldiers stand by and salute him. He doesn’t deserve this,” Hila told Channel 13.

Mizrahi isn’t the first Israeli soldier to have had a mental breakdown after a stint in Gaza and he certainly won’t be the last.

The Israeli military personnel, whose barbarism has few parallels in history, aren’t immune to the effects of their own barbarity. Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organisation founded by IDF veterans, has documented stories of their fellow soldiers who found their conscience after visiting indignities upon the occupied Palestinians, whom they consider subhuman.

There is plenty of video testimony of IOF personnel angrily recounting their predicament at the Israeli parliament, hoping for state doles to take care of them during their suffering. Here’s one such testimony in which one Israeli cries about being haunted by the ghost of a person he presumably killed in Gaza:

“They send me to another and another unit… They screw me around. And no one takes responsibility. No one gives me therapy. And I complain! I shout! I pee at night from post trauma. He comes to me and says, ‘Why did you kill me?’ ‘Why did you kill me?’ Can you function the day after something like this? Can you eat? Can you at all succeed in life?”

Here’s Avihai Levi, another Israeli who served in a prior barbaric assault on Gaza, recounting the horrors that haunt him after the terrorism he wrought upon the innocents in the enclave:

“I became paralysed and extremely violent. I have debts of over 800,000 shekels. I’m restricted from all directions. This is my wife [points to her]. I almost killed her several times with my hands last year. I urinate on myself at night. I’m scared. I can’t sleep in the bedroom if I don’t drink a whole bottle of alcohol every day. I can’t sleep at all… I struggle every day. I hit my wife every day. I urinate on myself. Understand, and you talk about weak people. I have a head injury from an RPG. I am talking to you as if an RPG is hitting me, and I’m fighting. I smell the scent of corpses.”

While army personnel in conventional warfare struggle to come to the grips with the destruction they become willing or unwilling participants in, it is not hard to see how such a thing will be especially difficult for personnel who are literally committing genocide. A genocide in which they are making no distinction between a pregnant woman, a toddler, or an elderly person — individuals who are protected in wars.

What the Israelis have been up to in Gaza, especially for the past eight months, is not war but unbridled terrorism. They have burned toddlers to death, beheaded them, shot their parents execution style, skinned them, and stolen their organs. They have even raided cemeteries to steal corpses. They have visited the worst possible indignities on innocents they have kidnapped and tortured them in their dungeons.

The psychological effects after such gruesome acts is inevitable.

Way back in February, the Israeli army reported that 30,000 of its personnel had sought treatment for mental health. That number would have risen considerably by now.

A Haaretz report from March 23, said that the Israeli army hasn’t faced a mental health crisis of this magnitude in over 50 years:

The head of the IDF’s mental health department and its array of therapeutic units are coping with the biggest psychological crisis the army has faced since 1973. But, Dr. Lucian Tatsa-Laur says, if soldiers are brave enough to fight, ‘they won’t fall apart after going home’

That last line doesn’t seem to be holding up. Just ask Mizrahi’s family.

In the last chapter of his seminal text The Wretched of the Earth, the French anti-colonial philosopher and acclaimed psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon writes about a French patient of his who suffered from mental breakdowns, having administered brutal torture regime against the colonised Algerians.

Fanon writes of a particular experience with this French patient of his:

As the patient in question refused to go to the hospital, I treated him privately. One day, shortly before the therapeutic treatment was due to begin, I had an urgent call from my department. When A— reached my house, my wife asked him to wait for me, but he preferred to go for a walk in the hospital grounds, and then come back to meet me. A few minutes later as I was going home I passed him on the way. He was leaning against a tree, looking overcome, trembling and drenched with sweat: in fact having an anxiety crisis. I took him into my car and drove him to my house. Once he was lying on the sofa, he told me he had met one of my patients in the hospital who had been questioned in the police barracks (he was an Algerian patriot) and who was under treatment for “disorders of a stuporous nature following on shock.” I then learnt that the policeman had taken an active part in inflicting torture on my patient. I administered some sedatives which calmed A—'s anxiety. After he had gone, I went to the house in the hospital where the patriot was being cared for. The personnel had noticed nothing; but the patient could not be found. Finally we managed to discover him in a toilet where he was trying to commit suicide: he on his side had recognized the policeman and thought that he had come to look for him and take him back again to the barracks.

Fanon’s case study illustrates the severe impact that inhumane acts have on both those who carry them out on a vulnerable population and on the victims themselves.

It all points to the care that the suffering Palestinians will need once — rather if — their annihilation stops; and if there are still any Palestinians left to be cared for, to be looked after, to be consoled for their suffering, and to be rehabilitated.

The carnage that the Israeli terrorists masquerading as soldiers have wrought in Gaza over the last eight months far exceeds what their predecessors have done in their earlier barbaric assaults on the captive population of the tiny enclave. There is no doubt that the latest batch of graduates from the Israeli School of Genocide will be suffering even worse mental anguish than their predecessors, and it’s very likely that many more will be going down the Mizrahi route.

Moreover, given the fact that the Israeli economy is in tatters and the chosen ones are leaving the stolen Palestinian land in droves, chief among those fleeing the psychiatrists, who will be in high demand once the broken military personnel return to their stolen homes, the prospects don’t look all that bright for the Israeli terrorists currently inflicting unimaginable human suffering in Gaza.

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