On what Israeli soldiers are telling us — and what we are choosing not to hear
I keep returning to one sentence. It was spoken by an Israeli soldier watching another soldier destroy a Palestinian home, urinating on photographs, smashing what remained of someone’s life. A fellow soldier looked uncomfortable. The first soldier turned to him and said: “They aren’t coming back here anyway. Their story is done.”
I do not think I have read a more chilling encapsulation of what has been happening in Gaza. Not because it is the most violent thing said in the testimonies published recently by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz — it isn’t, not by a long way. But because of its casualness. Its finality. The way it reaches beyond the act of destruction and into the realm of intention. Not just we are destroying this but they are finished. Not just violence but erasure.
These testimonies — given by Israeli soldiers and reservists, under aliases, to journalist Tom Levinson — deserve to be read slowly and taken seriously. Not because they are comfortable reading, which they emphatically are not, but because they represent something rare and legally significant: insider accounts, given voluntarily, accompanied by evident psychological collapse, and corroborated across multiple independent sources. People do not confess to things that destroy them without reason. And these men and women are being destroyed.
What They Saw. What They Did.
Yuval is 34. He grew up in a Tel Aviv suburb, trained as a computer programmer, and until recently worked at one of the world’s biggest technology companies. He served in Khan Yunis in December 2023. His unit, acting on drone intelligence, charged at figures considered suspicious. When they got there, the bodies on the ground were those of an elderly man and three teenagers. None of them were armed.
A battalion commander arrived. One of his men spat on the corpses and shouted that this is what happens to anyone who crosses Israel.
Nobody said a word.
Yuval was discharged months later. His colleagues threw him a party. They called him a hero. He felt, he says, like a monster. He has thrown his mirrors out because he cannot bear to look at himself. He does not leave the house. He told Haaretz that in some ways he wants to die, that he only keeps going because he promised his mother. Two days after that interview, he was hospitalised in a psychiatric ward.
Maya studies philosophy — Foucault, questions of power and truth — and served hundreds of days as an HR officer in an Armoured Corps battalion. She describes watching a tank open fire with its machine gun on five Palestinians crossing into northern Gaza. Four were killed. Their bodies were buried in the sand by a bulldozer shortly afterwards; she was told it was to stop disease spreading. The one who survived was caged at the outpost. That night, soldiers invited Maya to come and watch as one of them urinated on the blindfolded, cuffed man in the cold. He screamed the names of Be’eri and Nova — the sites of Hamas’s October 7th massacres — as justification for what he was doing. The others laughed. Maya thinks she may have laughed too.
A Shin Bet interrogator arrived the following day, spent ten minutes with the prisoner, and established that he was simply a man trying to return home. Nothing to do with Hamas. He was let go.
Maya now showers three times a day. The image of the man’s helplessness will not leave her. She volunteers with refugees. She goes to protests. She had considered herself a moral person. That is precisely what makes it unbearable.
Yehuda’s account carries perhaps the greatest legal weight of all. His unit responded to a Palestinian who had approached an outpost perimeter. When they arrived, the man had his hands up. He was unarmed. An officer — an itinerant, unstable figure who had been attaching himself to successive brigades — walked up to him, waited a few seconds, and shot him dead. No warning. No question. Nothing.
Back at base, Yehuda and other officers watched the drone footage of the killing. One of the older officers said plainly: “This is murder, just murder.” Then they filed a report to brigade headquarters describing the killing of a terrorist.
The officer continued serving. There was no debriefing. No investigation. The incident was discussed by no one, as though it had never occurred.
Two months later, Yehuda visited the Prado Museum in Madrid with his wife. He found himself standing in front of a Goya painting — a helpless man, hands raised, rifles pointed at him. He began to sweat. He could not look away. He started to cry, without warning or understanding, in front of strangers in a gallery. That night, he promised his wife he would find a therapist. He is trying, he says, to learn to accept what he became. He does not yet know how.
Eitan witnessed something of a different order. His unit detained a Hamas operative and waited for a Unit 504 interrogator. When the man arrived with a combat soldier, Eitan watched from the doorway as the interrogator removed the prisoner’s clothing, attached cable ties to his genitals, and tightened them, repeatedly, asking questions between each turn of the ties. The prisoner screamed. Eventually he spoke. He was then put in a truck and driven away.
“It shattered everything I thought about the army,” Eitan says, “everything I thought about us, about me. What other secrets are we hiding?”
Ran never entered Gaza at all. He was an air force reservist in Tel Aviv, part of the team that planned airstrikes. After October 7th, he says, everything changed. Collateral damage calculations were effectively abandoned. Strikes were approved that everyone in the room knew would kill dozens of civilians — sometimes more. He describes planning a strike in which children would die, then going for lunch on Ibn Gabirol Street. The dissonance, he says, began to feel like a mark forming on his forehead.
On 18th March last year, Israel breached its ceasefire with Hamas and launched a night of airstrikes that killed hundreds of people, most of them civilians. Ran could not continue. He went home and did not go back. He now spends hours searching the internet for photographs of dead and wounded Palestinians, trying to reconstruct whether he bears responsibility for any of them. His therapist has asked him to stop. He cannot.
Several pilots made the same decision that night. The air force agreed to relieve them, but asked them to say nothing.
Guy is in the Shaldag special forces unit — elite, highly trained, deployed since the first hours of the war. He was called up at noon on 7th October and sent directly to Be’eri. What he failed to prevent there haunts him. So does what came after. He describes watching his comrades’ eyes light up before operations.
When there was talk within the unit of the “special means” used to kill large numbers of people in the tunnels, others were excited. Guy thought of the Holocaust. He has since stopped eating meat. The smell of burned flesh at Al-Shifa Hospital reminded him of what he had encountered at Be’eri, and something in him broke at the connection. What have we become? he asks. What have I become? He is afraid, he says, to answer.
The Institution Protects Itself
I want to dwell on something that receives less attention than the individual testimonies but is, in some respects, even more damning: the institutional response.
Killings were falsely reported to brigade headquarters as terrorist eliminations. Officers who watched drone footage of an extrajudicial killing described it amongst themselves as murder and then did nothing, filed the false report, and moved on. Pilots and soldiers who found themselves unable to continue were quietly accommodated and asked to keep their reasons private. There were no debriefings. No investigations. No consequences.
At policy level, the IDF’s response to the swelling crisis of moral injury has been to rename it.
Soldiers experiencing what experts recognise as moral injury — the specific psychological wound caused by witnessing or committing acts that violate one’s core values — are not, in official IDF terminology, suffering from moral injury. They are suffering from an “injury of identity.” The difference is not semantic. As a military mental health officer told Haaretz, the language shift moves responsibility onto the soldier’s internal world rather than onto the actions his commanders sent him to carry out. It protects the institution by pathologising the individual.
The reason for the change was stated plainly at an internal meeting, according to one officer present: “We can’t call them moral injuries; do we need Channel 14 to hang us from a tree?” — a reference to the television channel aligned with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government.
The calculation was transparent. This is not about healing soldiers. It is about managing political exposure.
Israel’s Defence Ministry does not officially recognise moral injury as a diagnosis. Soldiers seeking help are classified instead as suffering from PTSD — a genuine and serious condition, but a different one, with different causes and different treatment. The two can overlap, but they are not the same thing. Treating a moral injury as a fear-based trauma response is likely to make the moral injury worse.
A public committee is expected to recommend formal recognition of the condition. Until then, those most in need of the right kind of help are being given the wrong kind, in a system that has a political interest in not looking too closely at why they are ill.
I am not a lawyer. But I think it matters to engage with the legal dimensions of these testimonies honestly, rather than either overstating or dismissing them.
In international criminal law, insider testimony — given voluntarily, corroborated independently, and accompanied by evident distress — is amongst the most significant evidence a court can receive. These are not allegations made by adversaries. They are not inferences drawn from satellite photographs or casualty statistics. They are admissions, made by participants, with full knowledge of what they are saying about themselves. The tribunals at Nuremberg, and later at the ICTY during the proceedings on Bosnia, treated this category of evidence as uniquely probative precisely because it is so difficult to fabricate and so costly to give.
On unlawful killing: the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols prohibit the deliberate killing of unarmed civilians. The accounts of Yuval, Yehuda, and Maya each describe what would, in any jurisdiction that takes international humanitarian law seriously, constitute war crimes. But what elevates individual crimes into something more systemic is the command dimension. In each of these incidents, senior officers were present or promptly informed. In each case, the response was concealment, not accountability. Under the Nuremberg principles and Article 28 of the Rome Statute, superiors who knew of crimes and failed to prevent or punish them are criminally liable. The officers who watched drone footage of a killing they called murder, then filed a false report, did not merely fail to prevent a crime. They became part of it.
On torture: what Eitan describes is unambiguous. The deliberate infliction of severe pain by a state agent for the purpose of extracting information satisfies the definition of torture under the UN Convention Against Torture, to which Israel is a signatory. The absence of any intervention, investigation, or consequence is itself a further violation of the Convention’s requirements.
On dehumanisation: scholars who study genocide and mass atrocity have consistently identified the prior dehumanisation of a target group as both a warning sign and a facilitating mechanism. It lowers the psychological barrier to violence. It creates a moral environment in which killing becomes ordinary, even righteous.
What the testimonies here describe is not the dehumanisation of an enemy in the abstract heat of battle, but something more deliberate and more pervasive: a shared framework, operational across units, tolerated by commanders, in which Palestinian life was assigned no value. Calling Palestinians Nazis to justify stealing from their homes. Burning their photographs. Urinating on their images and on their bodies. Looking at a caged and blindfolded man in the cold and performing cruelty for entertainment. The soldier who told his uncomfortable colleague that the Palestinians were not coming back anyway — that their story was done — was not making a prediction. He was articulating a world view that had been normalised around him.
And then there is the question that I suspect many people are asking but are reluctant to name directly.
The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. Those acts include killing members of the group and causing serious bodily or mental harm. Both elements require evidence: the acts themselves, and the intent behind them.
On the acts: the killings, the torture, the systematic destruction of homes and burial of bodies, the planning of strikes with known mass civilian casualties — these fall within the scope of Article II of the Convention. On intent: this is where it becomes harder and more contested.
Intent, in international law, must be demonstrated and not merely inferred. But statements like “their story is done” — combined with the scale of civilian death, the planning of strikes known in advance to kill children, and what amounts to a deliberate cultural erasure (photographs burned, bodies buried in sand, homes levelled) — speak to what legal scholars call eliminationist intent. Not merely the intention to defeat Hamas, but the intention that the Palestinian population of Gaza should have no future there.
I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying. These testimonies do not, by themselves, prove genocide. That determination requires adjudication by an international court, examining the full evidentiary record, applying the full weight of legal analysis. The International Court of Justice, ruling in January 2024 on South Africa’s application, found that it was plausible that Palestinian rights under the Genocide Convention were at risk — a preliminary finding, not a verdict. What these testimonies do is deepen and corroborate that record with ground-level, firsthand evidence of the conduct and the culture that produced mass Palestinian death.
What We Are Choosing Not to Hear
There is something that I find almost as troubling as the testimonies themselves, which is the silence with which they have largely been received in the West.
These are Israeli soldiers. Speaking to an Israeli newspaper. Describing, in their own words, the killing of unarmed civilians, the torture of prisoners, the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians, and the institutional cover-up of all of the above. They are not doing so to make a political argument. They are doing so because they are psychologically breaking apart under the weight of what they did and saw and did not stop.
When a person volunteers an account that destroys them — that costs them their job, their sleep, their sense of self, their will to live — we should take that account seriously. We should not look away from it because it is uncomfortable, or because it complicates a narrative we have already decided on, or because the political consequences of reckoning with it feel too large to manage.
The soldier who could not stop looking at the Goya painting in Madrid, who began to weep in front of strangers, who could not explain to his wife what was happening to him — he knew something. His body knew it before his mind could articulate it. Goya painted that scene, soldiers with rifles and a man with his hands raised, because he understood that the capacity for this kind of violence is not aberrant. It is human. It has always been human. The question is not whether we are capable of it. The question is what we choose to do when we see it.
Except that it isn’t. And we know it isn’t. And that is precisely what the soldier who said it was trying not to think about, in the same way that Yuval is trying not to look at his own reflection, in the same way that the IDF is trying to rename a moral wound so it does not have to examine what caused it.
You cannot bury this in the sand. You cannot rename it into something more manageable. You cannot stand in front of a Goya painting and not understand, on some level, what you are looking at.
The question is whether the rest of us will.
Ajmal Masroor
19/04/2026
London, UK
Based on testimonies published by Haaretz, April 2026, reported by Tom Levinson.
