He was an officer in the reserves who a few weeks before his suicide said the war would have ‘unforeseen consequences’ and therefore ‘had to stop’.
ed note–as always, lots of ‘must knows’ that every war-weary Gentile with a vested interest in his/her own future survival needs to understand about all of this.
Firsto, ladies and Gentile-men, a lil’ pictographical digression–
The above pic features Lyle Menendez of the ill-famed ‘Menendez brothers’ who murdered both of their uber-wealthy parents by blowing them to pieces with a shotgun in 1989.
Of the many memorable moments that took place in that murder trial, one of them was when each of the two killers broke down in tears while on the witness stand in the attempt at garnering sympathy with the members of the jury who would decide whether or not they were innocent or guilty.
And in many ways, ladies and Gentile-men, we, the Gentiles making up the ‘People’s Court’, must apply similar ‘optics’ when considering the parameters of the story below.
In making this case before the ‘People’s court’, let the following piece of evidence from the story itself be entered into the record–
‘A 2017 Israel Air Force study of 41 drone operators who fought in the 2014 Gaza war looked different…None of them suffered from depression or anxiety…’
In other words, ladies and Gentile-men, in previous instances where IDF terrorists were engaged in mass murdering innocent men, women, and children in Gaza, and particularly those flying drones for the IAF, none of the ‘mental problems’ now being ‘suffered’ by Netanyahu’s hired killers in the present massacre were an issue.
So what’s the difference here? Was the mass murder taking place in 2017 (and previous massacres as well) somehow ‘better’ or ‘less bloody’ than what took place between 2023-2025?
Of course not, fellow Gentiles.
What IS different these days however is the following–
–that recently was enough of a concern that in his most recent trip to meet with POTUS DJT, Netanyahu’s jet was forced to fly a longer flight path in order to avoid crossing into the airspace of countries that are signatories to the International Criminal Court Charter and who might, just might, decide to force his plan to land and execute those war crimes arrest warrants on him.
In other words, ladies and Gentile-men, the Jews, at least some of them, are starting to realize that this time they went too far, and some of them, (and no doubt many of them featured in the story below) want it ‘on the record’ that they feel really, really, REALLY bad about murdering all those innocent men, women, and children in Gaza in case they find themselves in the crosshairs of war crimes arrest warrants as well.
Now, as far as the one unnamed IAF officer who we are all told felt so really, really, REALLY bad about all the innocent men, women, and children that he murdered taking his own life, consider an alternative (possible) explanation as well–
That he didn’t take his own life, but rather, was killed by the state because he knew things/saw things/heard things/did things/said things that made him a serious liability, a possibility that contains some degree of currency with it when we consider that he is on the record saying shortly before he ‘took’ his own life that the present war in Gaza will have–
‘Unforeseen consequences’…
–and therefore, that it–
‘Had to stop’…
So, once again, ladies and Gentile-men, as much as it is within our Gentile-ish natures to want to give all people the benefit of the doubt and to consider the possibility that maybe, just MAYBE, these mass murderers involved in the religiously-commanded slaughter of innocent men, women, and children in Gaza possess some crocodile’s teardrop of human conscience that has now been ‘touched’ in a profoundly negative and painful way as a result of what they did…
…the smart money however says that this is a case of murderers crying in court before the assembled jury, because, if it is anything that the Jews have demonstrated beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt, it is the fact that they are as much natural born liars as they are natural born killers.
Haaretz
It was 6 P.M. at a military ceremony in central Israel. Dozens of air force officers saluted, several of them senior. But there were no microphones for the eulogies, no cameras commemorating the hugs and tears.
This was a few months ago, but a gag order still blocks the publishing of the name of the officer who was buried that day. He was a senior officer in the reserves, a veteran drone operator.
Like many traumatized victims of the war who have taken their own lives, he remains unknown to the public, as are the circumstances that led to the suicide.
‘He loved the army and the country very much,’ says someone who served with him. ‘The horrors of the war and all the killing were hard for him. It oppressed him. I saw him gradually wilt and lose it.’
This source says the senior officer was in charge of drone takeoffs and landings, not the attacks. But he saw everything, the result of every takeoff.
‘I realized that it bothered him, that his participation was hard for him,’ the source adds. ‘Most people here might manage to repress it, but for him apparently the wall broke. It didn’t happen all at once, but slowly but surely.’
In recent months, Haaretz spoke with many of the officer’s acquaintances, colleagues, and relatives, who describe him as brilliant, a ‘people’ person, charismatic, loved by everyone, the salt of the earth.
But other things were said, almost in a whisper. ‘He has a sensitive side that he didn’t express outwardly, that contrasted with his macho facade,’ a relative says.
A drone operator who did over 500 days of reserve duty in the war knows about the emotions that aren’t always visible. ‘People think that our job is like PlayStation, but that’s wrong,’ he says.
‘Physically we’re far from the battlefield, but psychologically we’re as close as possible. We see the attacks with a better visual quality than you’d think, we’re exposed to particularly harsh sights, we hear everything on the two-way radio and understand the consequences.’
It’s true, he says, that the drone operators’ lives aren’t in danger, but their ability to take lives is no less complicated. ‘We play God and decide who will live and who will die,’ he says.
‘We’re responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, some of them innocent. There are operators who have to return home knowing that they killed children, that they hit our soldiers by mistake. That’s likely to leave a scar that won’t heal. I have no doubt about that.’
Another officer, also a drone operator, mentions a conversation with the senior officer a few weeks before he ended his life.
‘He said that we had to stop this, that we had to stop the war, that it would have consequences that we didn’t understand yet,’ the officer says. ‘He said that he feared for the fate of the hostages, and that by our actions we were endangering them.’
And then there was another death. In February, a young drone operator, a second lieutenant, shot himself. His body was found at an air force base. Not long before, army sources say, he had accidentally caused the crash of one of the aircraft and struggled to cope with his sense of failure.
‘Physically we’re far from the battlefield, but psychologically we’re as close as possible. We see the attacks with a better visual quality than you’d think.’
A drone operator who did over 500 days of reserve duty in the war
According to a relative of the senior officer, the two knew each other. ‘He mentored many soldiers, he had a fatherly responsibility for them,’ the relative says. ‘In a way, he felt that they were all his sons, that [the young officer’s death] broke him, wounded his soul.’
The army acknowledged that in the months leading up to his suicide, the senior officer had been receiving psychological treatment, and mental health professionals in the IDF were aware of his condition. Still, the Air Force continued to allow him to operate drones. ‘He was the best we had,’ a senior officer said. ‘We couldn’t afford to lose him during a multifront war.’
People who served with him also report that his mental state deteriorated before his suicide; they say this was directly related to his reserve duty. ‘We thought that participating in the war against Iran would give him a sense of pride and improve his condition, but that didn’t happen,’ one of them said. ‘He was extremely stressed, and along with dealing with the horrors of the war, he was grappling with a personal crisis unrelated to the military. I guess the combination threw him into a kind of whirlpool, and he just drowned.’
There’s the bigger, more complicated picture, says a senior official in the Medical Corps familiar with both cases. ‘We have to remember that many drone operators were exposed to the killing of civilians, suffered operational failures and dealt with immense pressure – and didn’t take their own lives,’ he says, adding that ‘in most cases, suicide stems from a combination of factors, not just one.’
For its part, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said in a statement: ‘IDF commanders place the highest importance on preventing suicide and providing mental health care … including to air crews, drone operators and to other combat and combat-support roles in the air force. Over the past two years, more than a thousand mental health officers have been deployed across various units, taking into account the characteristics of each unit.’
Regarding the senior officer who took his own life, the IDF said the Military Police were investigating and would submit a report to the military advocate general, after which conclusions would be presented to the family. ‘The IDF shares in the grief of the bereaved family and will continue to support them,’ it said.
A ‘moral injury’
Experts who have read the accounts collected by Haaretz, including officers in the Israel Defense Forces’ mental health system, believe they’re hearing about a person who suffered a so-called ‘moral injury’.
‘When a soldier is aware of the gap between his ethics code and his conduct or a mistake that blatantly violates that code, he experiences a dissonance and internal conflict that can be extremely intense and tear him up inside,’ says Prof. Zahava Solomon, an expert on trauma research and the former head of the IDF mental health department’s research division.
‘When soldiers feel that their actions are unforgivable, they may have a hard time finding a way to reconcile this with themselves and others.’
Studies published in the United States in the past two decades on drone operators who led attacks in Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan showed that many of them reported serious psychological symptoms.
But a 2017 Israel Air Force study of 41 drone operators who fought in the 2014 Gaza war looked different. None of them suffered from depression or anxiety.
Still, the latest war was far longer than any other Israeli war in which drone operators took part, and both the scale of the destruction and the number of dead on the other side were far greater. So the IDF is now drawing up a study on the war’s psychological effects on drone operators, the sources say.
‘When a soldier is aware of the gap between his ethics code and his conduct or a mistake that blatantly violates that code, he experiences an internal conflict that can tear him up inside.’
Recently, Haaretz learned of three cases of drone operators in their 30s who are suffering from psychological problems after hundreds of days of reserve duty in the war. Two of them asked to be recognized by the Defense Ministry’s rehabilitation department and were accepted as war-wounded.
‘At first, nothing bothered me,’ one of them told Haaretz. ‘I was focused on the mission. With all my heart, I believed in what we were doing. But that conviction weakened. I felt that I aged during this war, that I’m a different person.’
He says the turning point came near the Netzarim corridor in the central Gaza Strip. ‘A brigade commander ordered me to fire at two figures who were approaching from the south, so I launched a drone at them,’ he says. ‘It turned out that it was just two kids. Maybe they were looking for food. Maybe they were lost. Who knows?’
At first he didn’t think about this mistake too much. ‘But as the days went by, I realized that it was oppressing me, that occasionally I would remember and have a feeling of shame, of disgust,’ he says. A few weeks later he asked to be discharged. He told his commanders that he was worn out, but he knew that this wasn’t the whole truth.
‘I was sure that after returning to civilian life the situation would improve, but it only got worse,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t forget about it. I never took part in an attack whose purpose was revenge; it was always cases where I thought they were endangering the forces. Still, it’s hard for me to bear; it’s burning me up inside.’
‘I didn’t join the army to harm innocent people. It’s hard for me to live with the feeling that that’s what I did. I had thoughts of ending it all, of killing myself, but I fight them, mainly for the sake of my family. It’s only for them that I’m still alive.’
According to Prof. Eyal Fruchter, head of Israel’s national PTSD council, a moral injury is very similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. But with PTSD, someone was threatened with injury, death, or sexual abuse that they interpreted as a danger to their own life.
With a ‘moral injury’, people experience a blow to their moral integrity, not their physical, psychological, or sexual integrity. The method of treatment is also different.
‘While with PTSD the treatment will be exposure to the trauma, with moral injury the treatment will include an attempt to accept the act that caused the ideological rupture in the patient,’ Fruchter says.
Some patients, however, are in a far more advanced stage. ‘I was discharged recently after hundreds of days of reserve duty, and I can attest that I’m simply a different person,’ another drone operator says.
‘When I was in the reserves I tried not to open the news, not to see pictures from Gaza, not to think about the hostages – only to focus on the mission. I was afraid that all these distractions would harm my ability to function.’
To some extent, this strategy worked while he was in uniform. But when he was discharged, everything changed. ‘Suddenly I remembered a serious incident in the northern Strip in which I hesitated before attacking, and terrorists emerged from a tunnel and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at soldiers,’ he says.
‘Two of them were killed. Only after my discharge did I have the courage to look up their names, and when I saw their faces, that finished me. I read the eulogies and didn’t stop crying.’
A moral injury is very similar to post-traumatic stress disorder, even if with PTSD, someone was threatened with injury, death, or sexual abuse that they interpreted as a danger to their life.
And there were other triggers. ‘I went into Telegram and saw lots of pictures of dead Palestinians. Suddenly it hit me that I was part of all that crap, that there are bodies with my name on them,’ he says.
‘People will say that what I did had to be done and that I didn’t intend to harm innocent people. Still, I feel a pain that’s hard to describe in words. I’m angry at myself; sometimes I don’t even know why.’
But he’s also angry at the people he says stood on the sidelines. ‘The commanders didn’t do enough to help, to prepare us for the fact that these thoughts were likely to surface. The feeling is that we did our part and now they no longer need us,’ he says.
‘It’s insulting, I feel betrayed, and despite what people think, the pain is only growing now that we’re at the end of the war, because it feels like everybody is carrying on with their lives. They’re all euphoric that the hostages have returned and it’s over, and I’m still in the same place with my thoughts, with my guilt feelings. I feel that everything is closing in on me – alone, isolated.’
These feelings wouldn’t surprise Prof. Yossi Levi-Belz, head of the University of Haifa’s center for the study of suicide and mental pain. ‘Drone operators have been at the forefront of the IDF assault and are probably the combat unit that caused the most casualties for the other side,’ he says.
That has ramifications. ‘The problem with moral injury – especially with drone operators who are far from the battlefield and see the results of their actions only on the screen – is that sometimes the realization of the moral conflict doesn’t happen immediately after the event, but some time after,’ Levi-Belz says.
‘For example, when the intensity of the urgency and vengefulness and the desire to feel that you’re protecting the country suddenly drops, you look back and ask yourself, ‘What have I done?”
Moreover, ‘Drone operators were under great pressure to deliver the goods, in the sense of blowing Gaza sky-high,’ Levi-Belz says. ‘Some of this was due to the correct feeling that a great force had attacked us, and some of it was a pumping-up of the rage and vengefulness.’
But Levi-Belz also notes ‘betrayal-type moral injury. Somebody higher up, from the people in charge, gave me a mission or the coordinates of a building to strike that he shouldn’t have, that didn’t align with my moral truth. That is, what are we firing a rocket on, and why?’ This kind of injury ‘could be very severe,’ Levi-Belz says.
He and Fruchter definitely agree on one thing. ‘We’re going to have many more people in the country with moral injury, there’s no question about it,’ Fruchter says. ‘People are beginning to process what they’ve done, actions that may have been justified in the heat of the battle but at the end of the fighting look completely different.’
Then comes the issue of diagnosis, treatment, and support; for example, the senior officer who died by suicide. ‘He’s the type of person for whom reserve duty was part of his character, something to be proud of, but suddenly that changed,’ says an officer, a drone operator, who knew him.
‘He looked worn out, tired. It seemed that many things were bothering him, but I thought it was something temporary, so I didn’t do anything. But it was a real warning signal, and I feel guilty that I didn’t warn [his supervisors], that I didn’t do anything to save him.’
Another air force officer also blames himself for the senior officer’s death. ‘I heard him say that he was having a hard time with the war, that he had doubts about everything we were doing,’ the officer says. ‘I tried to tell him that it would definitely be over soon, that we’d soon see the end, but I didn’t do anything more than that. I abandoned his soul to die in battle.’
In its statement, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit added that ‘a 24/7 hotline has been established, and the mental health system has been expanded in all areas, including mental preparation, processing and treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
‘The IDF continues to work on expanding these services and adapting them to emerging needs as part of its overall commitment to the welfare of service members, while encouraging them to approach mental health teams.’