Trigger warning: This article discusses sensitive topics such as suicide.
Between January 2024 and July 2025, 279 IDF soldiers attempted suicide, a Knesset report released on Tuesday revealed.
Also, for every soldier who died by suicide in that time frame, there were seven more documented attempts of a soldier who tried to end their own life, a Knesset report revealed on Tuesday from data.
Conducted by the Knesset Research and Information Center, the study was initiated at the request of Hadash MK Ofer Cassif.
The report said that its findings only pertain to soldiers who were in active, mandatory, career, or reserve service at the time of their deaths. If a soldier had committed suicide even shortly after being discharged, they were not included in the survey.
Figures showing data from Israel-Hamas war
Notably, the findings introduced data that were collected throughout the Israel-Hamas War, which began in 2023 following Hamas’s October 7 massacre.
Twelve percent of the suicide attempts mentioned in the study were classified as severe, categorized as acts that could have led to death or serious injury. In comparison, 88% were classified as moderate, having a lower risk of causing death.
Addressing the spike in suicide rates, the report showed that 124 soldiers had committed suicide between 2017 and July 2025. Eleven of these soldiers were women.
In a further breakdown of these numbers, 68% were in mandatory service, 21% were reserve soldiers who committed suicide during active reserve duty, and 11% were serving as career soldiers, the report said.
From 2017 to 2022, between 42% and 45% of suicide deaths were combat soldiers. This number then dropped significantly to 17% in 2023, but later spiked to 78% in 2024.
Seventeen percent of the soldiers who committed suicide had met with an IDF mental health officer within two months before their death, according to the data documented in the past year, until July 2025.
Since 2023, the data showed there was a marked increase in both the number and proportion of reservists who committed suicide. Despite the difficulty of making long-term comparisons due to population size changes, especially during wartime, the report was still able to record this spike, it noted.
The report stated that most of the requested data came from the Mental Health Services Division of the IDF Medical Corps, along with findings drawn from Knesset committee discussions.
The Knesset has held many committee meetings in which the increasing urgency of addressing the issue of soldier suicide was raised. Soldiers and bereaved family members attended various discussions, expressing the need for further support for mental health and suicide prevention.
Cassif said that he had encountered delays in receiving the data “due to a lack of cooperation and concealment of information” by the Defense Ministry and the army.
“Through extraordinary and commendable effort, [the Knesset Research and Information Center] has finally managed to publish the information on suicides and suicide attempts among soldiers,” he said.