Since 7 October 2023, drugs are provided to the thousands of soldiers returning from Gaza. From cannabis to LSD by way of ecstasy, anything goes in the treatment of post-traumatic woes, which the Israelis, who comfort themselves by posing as victims, have dubbed “moral injuries”.

The pop-rock group Hatikva 6 brings together150 singers from 16 different brigades and is led by a huge, bearded 40-year-old, Òmri Glickman. The video of his song “Himnon ha’lokhem” was paid for by the Israeli army. This hymn to the soldier has the following chorus, repeated four times over :

"So who’s crazy ? It’s me who’s crazy."

Shot in the officers’ training school, it shows soldiers in army fatigues dancing joyfully to images of destruction in Gaza.

Israel treats this murderous madness with drugs. After three years of war, a self-obsessed, drug-taking nation is worried and fearful. In downtown Tel Aviv, the cloying whiff of grass hangs over the pavement cafés. The city is sullen compared with the vibrant bustle that prevailed before 2023; it just lets itself get stoned, recreationally or medically, since most of these smokers have prescriptions for their pot. And these men and women are often ex-soldiers back from Gaza.

Israel likes to see itself as the laboratory of the West. Army-appointed doctors are developing drug-based protocols to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among the thousands of conscripts and reservists who served in Gaza. Actually “treat” isn’t quite the right term. The administration of these substances is aimed rather at helping them forget a war in which only Palestinian journalists have been able to bear witness. And as of today, 262 of hem have been massacred by Israeli grunts. Hashish, marijuana, methamphetamines, hallucinogenic mushrooms: of the 500,000 soldiers who have served in Gaza, some 40,000 are being “treated” with these.

Before this, the only country to have drugged its soldiers - but also its population – on a large scale in a wartime situation was Nazi Germany, after 1939. Pervitin, a particularly addictive euphoric methamphetamine, would contribute to “overheating the country” in the words of essayist Norman Ohler. Soldiers, students, workers, train drivers and even physicians indulged in it wholeheartedly. “Pervitin is in step with Nazi Germany”, Ohler explains, and would enable the German people’s "national self-healing process.”

The Nazis, though they believed drugs were invented by Jewish doctors, allowed them to circulate freely until at least 1941. Millions took them. Hitler himself was given a daily shot by his personal doctor, who mischievously dubbed him “Patient no. 1”. Today pervitin is called crystal meth, and it is still produced and sold clandestinely, as fans of the series Breaking Bad know well.

For Ruchama Marton, an Israeli psychotherapist, psychiatrist and founder of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), who is active against the occupation of Palestinian land and defends the right to health care, “cannabis doesn’t cure a thing. It goes along with you. If you’re in a good mood it’ll enhance that feeling, but if you’re depressed, you’ll become even more so.” Ian Hamel, a GP in Tel Aviv, considers that “treating with drugs people who have known terror in Gaza or are ashamed of what they did there, is short-sighted. What about the side-effects, the addictions?” Dr Michael Zetoun is also worried about the long term: “The destruction, the death, Israel learned to handle them in the nineties with the terrorist attacks. Since Gaza, we’ve had to shift into a higher gear. The drugs arrived right on cue. But we lack experience.”

This isn’t the first time modern psychiatry has experimented with narcotics as a therapeutic aid, but it’s the first time in the context of a war. “For many years military psychiatrists believed post-traumatic stress disorder was a form of hysteria,” Ruchama Marton recalls. “And since psychiatry regarded hysteria as a female disorder, soldiers said to be hysterical were despised. How were they treated ? Ice-cold baths, electric shocks. But psychiatric cruelty didn’t cure them because nothing but death could erase what they had seen. In fact often enough they wound up being sent back to the battlefield to be killed.”

For the Israelis still fighting on various fronts, the war waged in Gaza has morphed into a huge aftercare situation. Dina, an angry-voiced NCO of 34, served in logis-tics in late 2023 and early 2024. “I saw women operating drones who threw blan-kets over their monitor so as not to see certain images,” avoiding, for example, the destruction of houses. “So when you come back from Gaza, there’s a contradiction between what you feel and the way you’re received. People talk to you about hero-ism when you know you’ve done appalling things. On the bases, the young guys smoke a lot of hash, and so afterwards…”

Tuli Flint also served in the West Bank and Gaza for many years. He now belongs to Combatants for Peace, an NGO created in 2005, made up of Israeli veterans and Palestinian resisters. A handsome man with a doctorate in criminology, a former officer and military psychiatrist, he welcomes me in a basement with oriental decor, not far from Rabin Square, named for the assassinated Prime Minister. His gaze is benevolent, but he is wearing army fatigues, as if this “left-wing” doctor had not quite broken with the warrior image :

Many people want immediate, concrete results, aimed at ’resetting’ traumas which you find unbearable. At the beginning of the war, trauma was easier to treat. But when it became more intense, as did the controversies, it became more complicated. There were the demos, the arguments about the hostages. The soldiers went back to the war with less conviction. They saw the ideal betrayed, they felt they were facing danger alone.”

In his view the soldiers’ trauma also stems from the fact that they find it hard to distinguish between war and war crimes. It’s surprising to observe, through various testimonies, that soldiers’ orders were often vague, imprecise, as if the army didn’t want to get too enmired on the ground. Left to their own devices, soldiers committed horrors. "For that kind of post-trauma there is no cure,” Dr Flint goes on.

“There is no magic solution, even if some drugs like MDMA can have a calming effect. It can also be said that medicinal cannabis has saved the lives of people suffering from PTSD and has stabilised many of them, but it has screwed up many more. Cannabis has a calming effect but it is not a treatment.”

With some insight, Dr Flint concludes that “it’s not people with PTSD we should be treating but rather colonisaton and apartheid”.

The statistics are staggering. Broadly speaking, Israel is a nation of addicts. In 2017, 27 % of the population between 18 and 65 years of age had smoked grass or hash at least once in the previous year, which was at the time a world record. According to the data gathered by the Medsped project, 14.8 % of Israeli boys from 15 to 17 have smoked cannabis at least once, as against 4.3 % of Egyptian boys. As for the metamphetamines like MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine), 3.5 % of Israeli boys have taken it at least once, the same as Algerian boys. And according to an official Israeli report, 54 % of conscripts had already smoked cannabis or a synthetic version of it, very widespread in the Middle East, before going into the army.

Addictions have greatly increased since 7 October 2023, by 180 % for tranquilisers and above all by 70 % nationwide for prescription opioids, according to statistics from Natal, acronym for “Victims of traumatisms linked to the national context”, an association specialising in the treatment of post-traumatic disorders. Israel is very worried about this phenomenon since already in 2020 it was world leader for the consumption of opioids of the Fentanyl type, as Dr Nadav Davidovitch points out in another report.

The country has a population of 10 million, of whom 500,000 are reservists. Professor Shaul Lev-Ran, founder of the Israeli Centre for Addictions, believes that 30-50 % of the Israeli population are addicted to one substance or another, as against 14 % prior to the autumn of 2023.

Moreover medicinal cannabis has been legal in Israel for nearly twenty years now, and the regulations governing its use were eased in April 2024 in the wake of the Gaza war, under strong pressure from doctors and their patients. In April 2026, 135,000 Israelis were smoking cannabis prescribed by their doctor. At least 8,000 former soldiers benefitted from this in 2024, 3,500 more in 2025 and the pace is not about to slacken, since the army is expecting between 5,000 and 8,000 soldiers needing treatment in 2026.

The Defence Ministry’s Department of Rehabilitation receives about 1,500 requests a month for the recognition of post-traumatic disorders, according to the Times of Israel. The same department speaks of 78,000 wounded since October 2023, a good share of whom have “psychologcal disorders.” Quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP), Professor Shaul Lev-Ran estimates the increase in the use of “prescription medicines, illegal drugs and liquor” at 25 % over the last three years.

The problem is a human one but it is also economic: the Natal association, which has worked with PTSD sufferers for 30 years, estimates the overall cost of trauma due to the war in Gaza at 500bn shekels over the next five years, so about €145bn at 2026 rates. This is approximately the equivalent of the French mental health budget. According to a study conducted by the health insurance services, the overall cost of mental disorders in France, where the population is seven times greater, is estimated at €24.7bn annually.

In Israel, where hyper-capitalism has been the driving force for some twenty years, soldiers suffering from post-traumatic disorders negotiate compensation for their loss of income, since many of them are unable to go back to regular work. Allocated by specialised committees which include both civilian and military personnel, this compensation will allow them to keep their heads above water.

So there’s no question of seeing former soldiers wandering the streets out of their minds, as happened in the US after the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The images of these abandoned veterans with all their belongings crammed into shopping trolleys haunted America for years. Great movies like Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978) illustrate how painful is the return to normal life.

Nothing like that in Israel, neither books nor films, and we’ve seen what happened with music... People had better not start going on about that pillar of national identity, the army, talking about the crimes committed in Gaza. Silence has its price. Committees decide the price of the “moral injury”, the current term for PTSD, while others prescribe drugs to make their patients forget. For the moment, it works. The Israeli army, normally very talkative, is practically mute on the subject.

However the issue of compensation for traumatised solders is becoming increasingly sensitive. While the government feels the cost is significant, the families of the “post-traumatised” are not happy with the sums allocated. Besides a ruined family life, the war has impoverished many. Not a word about the Palestinians, but then almost nobody in Israel ever talks about them. The wife of a reservist who came back from Gaza traumatised intends to create an association of families to agitate for better compensation. A home front initiative that makes you wonder.

Modern forms of cannabis, developed in laboratories and genetically modified, are super-powerful. Prescribed in Israel, they are imported from Canada and the United States. Israeli physicians believe they are better than illegal synthetic cannabinoids like Nice Guy and the Dosa, easy-to-produce drugs produced particularly by laboratories in the Algerian city of Constantine, according to a report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), and imported via Jordan.

In preference to these cheap but very addictive and dangerous drugs, many doctors prefer substances which are just as addictive but whose use they imagine they can control, rather than letting thousands of youngsters go off the rails or worse. Among the former conscripts and reservists from Gaza, there were 22 suicides in 2025 (60 since October 2023) out of 279 attempts between 2024 and 2025.

In order to cope with this flood of post-traumatic disorders, the Israeli Health Ministry has opened 14 new trauma clinics in its psychiatric hospitals since 7 October 2023. And the authorities are also counting on associations like Natal. “Trauma was a taboo in Israeli society, the association’s spokesperson Ifat Morad told Orient XXI. Our goal is to treat people, enable them to start living again. And we offer all that under a single umbrella.”

This non-profit association is present everywhere in the country and defines itself as apolitical. Its 140 employees and 1,100 therapists include Jews, Arabs and Druze. It provides treatments, some drug-based, and also deals with social reintegration. “There are lots of addictions to opioids, liquor, and synthetic drugs among the post-traumas,” Morad’s psychiatrist colleague Liat Barnea adds. “For the treatments, we take an integrated approach. Drugs can play the same role as other medicaments.” She prefers to use the term “national trauma” rather than “moral injury”. “It’s a lot broader than the war, it’s the fact of just living here,” she explains. “The whole society is depressed, it has lost confidence in the government and in itself. The national trauma comes from this feeling of betrayed trust. This is a vital issue for Israel because it might bring about the country’s collapse.”

In Natal each military patient is monitored by several persons both medically and socially. The social service is run by Shaked Areli and has grown by leaps and bounds: five employees three years ago, 45 today. “There’s no place for addicts in business, yet their return to work is in itself a therapeutic goal,” she explains.

At the Merhavim psychiatric hospital, soldiers back from Gaza are treated with powerful drugs. This collection of renovated barracks is scattered around a hilly park in the outer suburbs of Tel Aviv, not far from Beer Yaakov. It is fenced off and surrounded by elegant new ten-storey apartment blocks. New residents, new railway station, new streets: everything has changed in this corner of Israel which was once rural and Arab. These barracks were once a British military camp. “Quite a few psychiatric hospitals are set up in what used to be British or Jordanian military buildings,” says Dr Eran Harel, in charge of the day hospital.

This lithe young sixty-year-old with a candid look receives us in a room where he and two colleagues administer various drugs to volunteer patients, chosen in consultation with the army: LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), MDMA, known more commonly as Ecstasy, and psilocybine, a derivative of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He is following two protocols, each involving 30 patients who are going to attend 18 sessions. In his view, these experimentations are promising. “We are trying to understand how chemically-different substances like MDMA or LSD will act on the brain. In cases of PTSD related to a specific event the treatment is going to try to change the soldiers’ perception of what they felt, saw, understood ”, the physician explains.

For his part, Eran Harel agrees with those who do not believe in the usefulness of cannabis for the treatment of trauma :

“For 90 % of the trauma sufferers from Gaza we must deal with this question: what is the degree of your political innocence here ? In this country we have ideological indoctrination through education, value transmission, military discipline, so that an individual trauma is a challenge in the political meaning of the term.”

Annette Feld, a Tel Aviv psychoanalyst, agrees : “Drugs signal a form of weakness: we help them but we exclude them. Because drugs do not answer the question: what is making them sick?” Their country is, and seriously so. And if that cannot be stated, neither can it be cured.

Hofit X, a woman we met at a sidewalk table outside a quiet pastry shop in Tel Aviv, attests to this. She complains that the army took her husband Ben, a reservist, who was 42 in 2023. He came back traumatized and was treated with cannabis.“My family appears normal and you wouldn’t notice what is happening to us. But when he came back from Gaza, he was a different man. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t get out of bed, he was living in a bubble, and started smoking.” Ben, who had volunteered at the start of the war, was not in the front line. “He went into Gaza by night, with logistics convoys, with precise instructions on where to go. His feeling of guilt, he says, comes from his having maybe wounded children.”

Though generally uncommunicative on the subject, the Israeli press has reported several cases of guilt feelings of this kind. During his service as a reservist, Dr Yossi Levi-Betz told the daily Haaretz that he met people whose job consisted of marking houses to be bombed :

“During the first weeks, under the shock [of the Hamas attacks in October 2023] and with the idea of ‘never again’ they acted without thinking too much. Later, some came to me and said: ‘I gave the order to destroy hundreds of houses, thousands of people were hurt because of me’. At the time they thought it was necessary. But when the dust settled, they understood: I am guilty of the death of thousands of people. That’s where the breach comes – and it goes deep.”

For his part, since he came back from Gaza, Ben has not been able to kiss his three children, ages 8,12 and 15. At first he was utterly drug-dependent but now he is almost completely clean with the help of his analyst. Since then he has realised that “there’s no cure for what’s wrong with him,” his wife Ofit concludes.

It is guilt which has fed the work of Ido Roth, therapist and a big consumer of cannabis for many years. As he puts it, “cannabis enables you to deal with anxiety and anger, but mainly with guilt”. This therapist’s conviction is that by treating the guilt felt by soldiers with post-traumatic disorder, we can keep the feeling from spreading.

The guilt has to stay in Gaza, because if it spreads, the very stability of Israeli socety would be at risk:

“Nobody is detached from their family or their environment, what we call ‘the social atmosphere’. ‘I did or saw things I shouldn’t have,’ is what people say who are afflicted with PSTD. ‘But in front of an audience which represents Israel, I can’t say that, because they think I was right.’ There is a real dichotomy there.”

The war and its major traumatic consequences for soldiers and for the population as a whole have undermined what Professor Levie-Belz, a psychologist who was also a reservist in Gaza, calls the “Israeli ethic.” The moral injury is like a knife puncturing a warrior tradition, a kind of breach to make you disappear in a haze of hashish smoke.

For decades, psychiatrist Ruchana Marton has been speaking out against the war-mongering rhetoric of the Israelis, justified by the fact that they deem themselves victims of the Palestinians. “We invent fables. We try to rub away the stains, even those that are indelible. Since nothing can really obliterate the crimes we need to increase the dosages. The moral injury is a very good business and at the end of the day it’s capitalism that wins. We’ll wind up putting everybody on drugs.”

Victimhood is also what enables the Israelis to absolve themselves of their guilt, psychoanalyst Annette Feld believes : "When it comes to the war, we show what has been done, but not what we do. The present traumas become pathogenic by dint of accumulation. There were the pogroms, there was the holocaust, and now this war. A form of continuity through victimhood has set in. The soldier who served in Gaza will benefit from empathy and compassion and thus be spared the need for any explanation of what it was he took part in. No subjectivity, no questions, no responsibility: the drug will eradicate all traces of the war and in a certain sense complete the destruction of Gaza”.

“The first thing they suffer from is blindness,” adds psychotherapist Manal Abu Lak. She is an Israeli Palestinian, who works in the Ramleh dispensary, not far from Tel Aviv. “Jewish society cultivates fear, the fear of Arabs. The important thing is that the Palestinians should be effaced. As a Palestinian in a team of Jews, I can’t talk about what is happening in Gaza, it doesn’t interest them. I don’t exist and so my trauma doesn’t exist.”

We met her on the last day of our investigation and we realise that Manal is the first person to speak to us about the people of Gaza. “Health workers efface the genocide,” she remarks with a mixture of bitterness and anger. “I know the case of a soldier who committed suicide because he didn’t want to go back to Gaza; nobody wondered why. Another soldier suffers from PSTD because, he claims, he killed someone by mistake. He is being treated when he should be on trial.”

And indeed, while Israel may prefer to forget its crimes in clouds of smoke, it advocates a therapeutic model. The USA, Australia and Switzerland are carrying out similar experiments. On 18 April 2026 US President Donald Trump authorised the administration of psycho-stimulants with psychedelic properties, including ibogaine, to veterans afflicted with post-traumatic disorders. In France, journalist Dominique Nora reports in his Voyage dans les médecines psychédéliques (Grasset, 2025), that protocols based on psilocybine, a derivative of hallucinogenic mushrooms, are being applied on a small scale in Nîmes and Paris.

Natal sees a windfall effect in Israel’s advance in the use of drugs to treat soldiers’ PTSD. With its 30 years of experience combining drugs, medicine, psychiatric monitoring and social rehabilitation, the association is developing a method of treatment which it is exporting via training sessions in Germany and Ukraine. “In Germany," Dr Yifat Reuveni explains, “we have organised training sessions for teachers in the region of Essen to help them manage the stress of children faced with immigration and the arrival of strange children in their class…”

Nor must we forget the anthem of Betar, the far right Zionist movement from which Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud descends, as psychoanalyst Annette Feld reminds us with flawless lucidity in this country plagued by deadly ideologies :

“In blood and sweat There will rise for us a race That is proud, generous and cruel.”