“I don’t have good answers. I don’t have any answers at all. There’s no forgiving what I’ve done. No atonement,” says Yuval, a 34-year-old former Israeli soldier and computer programmer, in an expose published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on April 17.
Headlined ‘I Felt I Was a Monster’: IDF Soldiers Talk About the ‘Moral Injury’ — and the Silence, the article rips apart Israel’s well-curated myth of having the “most moral army in the world”.
It shows how Israeli troops in Gaza’s killing fields have committed acts of casual murder, torture, looting, and cover-ups since October 2023.
Upon returning to civilian life, some of them have had to wrestle with guilt.
But the anecdotes highlighting the so-called moral injury suffered by some Israeli troops constitute only a pale shadow of the irreversible horror inflicted on countless Palestinian victims in every part of Gaza.
In December 2023, near Salah al Din Road in Khan Yunis, Yuval’s unit charged after a drone spotted “suspicious figures”.
He fired “like a madman”, only to discover that he had helped slaughter an unarmed old man and three teenage boys.
Their bodies lay riddled with bullets, organs spilling out.
Then the battalion commander arrived. One soldier spat on the corpses and screamed, “This is what happens to anybody who messes with Israel, you sons of bitches”.
Yuval froze in shock but said nothing.
“I’m a loser, just a gutless coward,” he told Haaretz.
Between October 2023 and the end of 2025, more than 80,000 Israeli soldiers had been treated for psychological disorders.
Until October 2025, the Israeli army recorded 279 suicide attempts over the preceding 18 months, including 36 deaths.
The Haaretz article demonstrates what goes around comes around, even for the apparently unaccountable Israeli troops, albeit in a disproportionate, minute, and unjust way.
After all, these Israelis continue to live, breathe, pop pills, and attend therapy sessions, while their nameless Palestinian victims lie buried under tonnes of debris in unmarked graves, without even the dignity of proper burials.
Back in Tel Aviv after being honourably discharged, Yuval felt he was a “monster” because he had taken part in killing innocent people without any moral qualms at the time.
He quit his high-tech job, hid in hoodies, smashed his mirrors, and confessed to having suicidal thoughts.
“Maybe in some way I want to die, to get it over with.”
Two days after speaking to Haaretz, he was admitted to a psychiatric ward.
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However, his victims – or their corpses, to be accurate – are still under the rubble somewhere in Gaza, where Israel has dropped hundreds of tonnes of explosives equal to at least six “Hiroshima-sized” atomic bombs since October 2023.
The loved ones of Yuval’s numerous victims do not have access to therapy or anti-depressants. They continue to live in makeshift tents after losing all their possessions and means of income.
The pattern of guilt over war crimes repeats in every interview that’s part of Haaretz’s story.
Maya, an HR officer in an Armoured Corps reserves battalion, sat in a southern Gaza command room as five unarmed Palestinians crossed an “arbitrary line” set by the army.
The commander ordered fire. A tank’s machine gun took aim at the hapless Palestinians and released hundreds of bullets within seconds. Four of them died instantly.
A bulldozer arrived quickly at the scene and buried them “so the dogs wouldn’t eat them and spread disease”.