Suicide in Gaza: An Invisible Arm of Genocide
Content warning: Suicide, Violence, War, Sexual assault
Dedicated to the children of Palestine who are in pain. You are not alone. You are loved.
If you or anyone you know is experiencing thoughts of suicide, or going through a difficult time, you can call the following hotline numbers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In the West Bank and Jerusalem, call ‘Sawa’ organization at 121. In Gaza, call ‘Aisha’ organization at 1800 170 171. In Israel, call ERAN organization at 1201 (also available in English).
For U.S readers: If you or anyone you care about is experiencing thoughts of suicide, please call the Suicide and Crisis Hotline by dialing 988 for support across the U.S. For international hotline numbers, access this online list.
Again: You are not alone. You are loved.
Author’s Note: From their scholarly work “An autopsy of the coloniality of suicide: Modernity’s completed genocide”, Trisha X and marcela polanco utilize the term “euro-suicide” as a means to distinguish European-centric perspectives on suicide from the understanding of suicide that people of the global majority feel in their bodies and souls. To avoid confusion, I won’t be utilizing the term “euro-suicide”, but I want to preface that my entire perspective on this would be considered euro-centric. Understand as you read that when I reference suicide, I am referencing “euro-suicide”. As a white author, my POV is limited and, though I strive to decolonize myself, largely still colonized.
Any profits made from this article will go towards helping those in Palestine. Donations will be made to “Help Asmaa’s family evacuate from Rafah (Gaza).”
Suicide in Gaza: An Invisible Arm of Genocide
After losing my father to suicide, it won’t leave me alone, nor I it. Since childhood, my life has been about unpacking suicide, questioning it, analyzing it, studying the patterns, the signs, and living with it inside myself. Since October 7, there’s one question plaguing me: What about the suicides in Gaza? Suicide— an entire phenomenon that famously gets little attention during wartime. In all of the content I’ve seen thus far— footage from Gaza, especially— there is no mention of suicide. But we know it must be happening, right? How could it not be happening? As if war flips a switch and people stop dying by suicide for the duration? It’s happening, it’s just less visible.
In honor of the Palestinians under occupation, we’re here at Rebel-Mouthed Books to make suicide more visible with the aim of prevention. By talking about suicide, we can prevent it. In this piece, we will together explore available data on suicide rates in Gaza, the immediate and systemic causes, and how suicide can be wielded as a tool for oppression.
Let me tell you what this piece is NOT: It’s not a complete historical account of the genocide in Palestine, nor is it a persuasive argument about whether or not what Israel is doing is genocide (it is). This is not a piece about antisemitism and its fractured definition. This is not a piece about the merits and demerits of Zionism nor the history of Israel. If you’re looking for any of those things, look elsewhere.
Suicide rates in Gaza
Let us first acknowledge that suicide is slippery and elusive— hard to document, number, and understand. Any data about suicide we must first shade with the knowledge that we are seeing a sliver of truth. A small piece. Usually, the problem of suicide is much larger than the data alone shows. Why is this? The secrecy and silencing around suicide is due to a number of factors. According to some religions, suicide is a sin— a crime against God. And, in plenty of places, suicide is illegal and survivors can be prosecuted. Additionally, with so much stigma around mental health, some see suicide as weak or cowardly, not understanding the level of pain those tangled with suicide bear. For these reasons and more, survivors may conceal the suicide itself.
With all this in mind, we’ll take a closer look at the data, which can be categorized as either pre-October 7 (before the current escalation of violence) and post October 7 (data taken during the current war.)
Suicide rates pre-October 7
For the past 10 years, suicide rates in Gaza have been increasing. According to a Mondoweiss article titled, “Suicide in Gaza”,
“Between 2015 and 2018… the number of suicide cases doubled from 10 to 20 suicides for every 400-600 attempts.” And, “In 2020, Gaza police recorded 17 suicide cases out of 400 attempts.”
From a “Public Health Situation Analysis” by the World Health Organization,
“Before the escalation, 485,000 in Gaza suffered from a mental health disorder.” And even pre-escalation, there were barriers to mental health services such as “lack of trained staff, limited facilities, poor quality of services, affordability, under-resourcing, stigma, and discrimination.”
According to the World Health Organization, for every adult who dies by suicide, there may be more than 20 others who attempt the act. Per an article by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs titled, “Deterioration in the mental health situation in the Gaza Strip,”
“According to a 2017 study, a quarter of Palestinian pupils in grades 7-9 have contemplated suicide, with males being more likely than females to report suicidal thinking. Similar patterns were identified by AISHA: Some 30 per cent of the people aged 18-50 with whom the organization worked in 2020 reported suicidal thoughts and seven per cent had attempted suicide.”
Suicide rates post-October 7
The unfolding violence in Gaza happening right this moment presents a difficulty in assessing the true figures of deaths, not just from suicide. Even basic stats about those killed by the war are elusive. Current figures are more than likely underestimated, as it is. How can we find reliable numbers of suicide deaths when we can’t even find reliable numbers of deaths period? Fortunately, there are entities out there who are trying to record this kind of information.
The WHO “Public Health Situation Analysis” from May 2024 includes information on mental health in Gaza.
“In recent years, there are on average 562 attempts per year. The suicide rate is higher among young men age 18-30 who comprise about 75% of all suicide deaths.” And “Currently, 20,000 people are in need of specialized mental health services including mental health drugs, which are hard to access due to disruption to services.”
This is the very limited data we have right now.
Opinions on the data vary. For some, the numbers seem obscenely high, but for others, the numbers are actually low and represent Palestinian resilience. There are some medical professionals in Gaza who argue that Gaza has some of the lowest rates of suicide in the world. Dr. Jamil Suleiman, the head of the Mental Health department in the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza downplays the scope of suicide in Gaza. He claims,
“The mental health sector in Gaza is good. People receive treatment in six centers across the strip, one center in every province, and two centers in Gaza City, due to its population density. Palestine is at the bottom of the list of national suicide rates compared to countries that enjoy the best economic conditions.”
There is data to suggest that suicides used to be far less common amongst Palestinians, due to their resilience and the stigma. But the numbers are rising recently, and perhaps they will reveal more about the history of suicide in Palestinians communities— history that may have been covered up.
While appreciating the indomitable human spirit as a way to resist suicide, claims that any one group of people are less susceptible to suicide can be misleading. Like other myths, the belief that Palestinians actually resist suicide better than other peoples is meant to be uplifting and inspiring. But sometimes such myths can have the opposite effect— they can further stigmatize suicide and isolate those who might be suffering from suicide ideation from resources they need to survive. There are, to Dr. Suleiman’s point, plenty of videos on social media like this one of Palestinian families in Gaza finding joy and happiness even during a violent genocide. They are demanding and standing in their dignity. This doesn’t mean they aren’t suffering. Shared on social media, sometimes Palestinians in Gaza show us brief moments of happiness and joy in war footage, but that doesn’t delegitimize the atrocities happening simultaneously. In his video, Medo explains,
“If I show you that I’m actually enjoying my life and I’m trying to have fun that doesn’t mean that I’m actually happy. That doesn’t mean I’m not suffering. That doesn’t mean I’m not starving. All the things you see about the war are happening to me. I’m just showing you the 1% of my life, the 1% I’m trying to have fun. I’m a positive person… I try to enjoy life, no matter what I’m going through. You guys have no idea what we’ve been through. We’ve been through hell. I’ve seen death more than 3 times in the last 7 months and I’m telling you it’s not a good experience… Just imagine life with no electricity, a very very scarce amount of drinking water, very scarce amount of food… I haven’t had real meat in so long… We’re just having canned food… I’m not showing you this struggle… I’m showing you the 1% of positivity that we’re actually living… And today, when I go out to hang out with a friend, you guys just keep commenting stuff like, ‘Where’s the genocide? We don’t see no war. You guys are not starving. I don’t see no war at all. You have a pretty decent life.’ This is not our life, guys. We’re just trying to have fun amongst all this very very bad luck we’re having.”
All this to say, it’s clear that plenty of people are trying to stay positive through the genocide. That doesn’t take away from the horror of daily experience, which impacts mental health. Positivity doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem or that someone isn’t contemplating suicide.
Ultimately, these numbers are still incredibly limited and most likely inaccurate, but this is what we have. From a 2022 article titled, “Palestine needs to have a talk about suicide”,
““When we started work in the field of suicide in collaboration with the Palestinian Ministry of Health, we tried to really figure out the numbers and the exact data that can lead us and help us to identify cases and the situation with demographics in Palestine,” explains Mohammad [Qaisi, Projects Coordinator for Médecins du Monde Suisse in the West Bank and Jerusalem]. “But unfortunately, we lack documentation, and we lack data.””
Why?
Mohammad continues in the article,
“‘If you want to talk about the challenges regarding collecting data and identifying the situation, analyzing Palestine, the main thing is the stigmatization in the community,’ explains Mohammad. ‘In many cases identified by medical staff as suicide, the family tries to deny this [is the case], and puts pressure on medical staff not to document the case as such because it affects the family’s image in the community.’ Mohammad says families can go as far as physically attacking doctors and first responders to prevent them from registering the data.”
With so many complications and barriers, it’s amazing any suicides are reported at all. The data we’ve explored is a start. With time, data on suicides in Gaza will clear and, hopefully, become more accurate with better reporting and a change in the stigma associated. This data obscurity contributes to the invisibility of suicide during wartime or during a genocide.
Causes of Suicide in Gaza
We’ve looked at the suicide numbers, leading us to our next question which is: Why? Why is suicide happening at the rates we are seeing? There are long-term causes that have been building in Gaza for the last 70 years, then there are immediate, war-related causes that are directly attributable to the violence Palestinians are seeing currently.
When we look at the causes of suicide, I want to emphasize not only the immediate environment around the suicidal person, but also the deeper systemic roots. While, yes, an individual person’s biology and psychology play a part in mental health and suicide, that is not my primary focus in this piece. As written by Trisha X and marcela polanco in their scholarly article, “An autopsy of the coloniality of suicide: Modernity’s completed genocide”,
“In turn, an autopsy of the coloniality of suicide places responsibility on the inhospitality of the modern world-system’s genocide mechanisms of the civilization of death (Mignolo, 2010) via euro-suicide rather than on the persona’s mental health, psychiatric or psychological dysfunction, immorality, or criminality.”
I will be taking a similar approach here.
Israel’s long-term genocide against the Palestinians offers plentiful causes of suicide. Overall, there’s an intense lack of hope for the future and an unrelenting deprivation that wears on the human spirit.
Fadil Ashour, a local Gazan psychologist, points to “deprivation” as a major source of depression for Palestinians— deprivation from jobs, freedom of movement, necessary medicine and treatment, and deprivation from peace. Dr. Ashour identifies the multiple wars that Palestinians in Gaza have survived as a particularly devastating reason behind suicide. His words echo in my mind. “The death and destruction chase them in their dreams, and they have no way to escape it.”
A comment reposted by We Want to Live, captured the essence of the extensive social media activity following S.A’s suicide,
“Gazan youth are killing themselves because they have lost hope that anyone cares about them. They have lost hope because Palestinian parents are unable to meet the needs of their children. They have lost hope because when they graduate from university, they can’t find jobs. Young men have lost hope because they can’t afford to get married until their 30s; instead, they must remain at home, still asking for a handful of money from their parents and feeling useless.”
More immediately, according to an article from the United Nations Office of the Coordination of Human Affairs,
“The main causes of mental health deterioration in Gaza are recurrent violence, the ongoing blockade, deteriorating living conditions, including increasing poverty, and a sense of hopelessness.”
Deterioration of extended family networks, COVID-19, increased domestic gender-based violence, all are playing a role in the rates of suicide we’re seeing right this moment. According to that same article,
“SAWA, which runs Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) and gender-based violence (GBV) helplines across the oPt [occupied Palestine], reported a 30-35 per cent increase in calls in June-July compared with May. Accordingly, MHPSS service providers in Gaza have rapidly had to develop methods to reach people remotely, some operating around the clock.”
With all this chaotic context, the current war ignites a raging fire, sweeping the population of Gaza up in a wave of violence so threatening that suicide may become a more viable option in the face of it. Let’s attempt to deeply explore this beast.
On the surface level, military operations in Gaza are active and ongoing, causing widespread devastation, civilian fatalities, loss of critical infrastructure, and mass displacement. The numbers we have are probably low, but the “Public Health Situation Analysis on Hostilities in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt) – 02 May 2024 – WHO Report” explains,
“Between 7 October 2023 and the afternoon of 30 April 2024, at least 34,568 Palestinians were killed in Gaza and 77,765 Palestinians were injured, according to MoH in Gaza. Since 7 October, 474 Palestinians including 116 children, have been killed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and about 5,000 were injured. More than 10,000 people are estimated to be missing under rubble in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Civil Defence.”
Family networks are incredibly important in Palestinian culture and daily life. The loss of life means families torn apart— mothers without their children, children without their parents. The pain of this level of loss would emotionally devastate the survivors, perhaps enough to trigger suicidal thoughts and actions. The loneliness, the guilt, the heartache, the gut-wrenching terror of having witnessed it all compound into one unbearable misery that may never leave them. There is footage of children grieving their parents’ deaths after the Israeli airstrike on refugee camps in Rafah. One is weeping and cries, “My father is gone. I want to join my father. I want to go as well.”
Living in an active war zone is a cause of suicide. There is data out there to suggest suicides decline in wartime, however, it’s helpful to look case-by-case to learn more about the causes of the suicides that are reported and documented.
As included in the Public Health Situation Analysis,
“Now, the entire population of Gaza - 2.2 million people - is in urgent need of food, humanitarian assistance and protection. Among them, 1.7 million individuals have been displaced to make-shift shelters or overcrowded areas with limited access to necessities.”
Famine, according to a recent IPC assessment, is affecting over 1.1 million people currently in Gaza, and that number is growing. On-the-ground footage reveals people eating animal feed, dirt, and any remaining flour that can be found, turning the mixtures into small, cracked cakes. Some by the sea have turned to seaweed. Very little food aid is reaching inside Gaza. People are trapped with their hunger. Reports arose of a mother considering cutting off her own hand to feed her children. The end result is malnutrition, which leaves the body incredibly weak and vulnerable.
According to the Public Health Situation Analysis,
“Children’s acute malnutrition rates have doubled since January, with one in three under two suffering from malnutrition. Palestinians in Gaza now constituting some 80 per cent of all people facing famine worldwide. Gaza’s Health Ministry reported as of April 1, that 32 people, including 28 children, died of malnutrition and dehydration at hospitals in northern Gaza.”
An itvnews video from February 26 documents a man in despair with his hungry son. “I wish death on the children because I cannot get them bread. I cannot feed them. I cannot feed my own children. Every day there is death. There is no rice, no food, no flour. What did we do to deserve this?”
According to Palestinian journalist, Bisan, as of May 30, 2024, very little aid is getting into Gaza.
“… Because of the closing of all the crossings, preventing any aid from entering Gaza. And the temporary solution, the temporary [U.S] seaport was broken because of the weather so it is now closed. Actually it worked only for one or two days. Now it’s closed and no food is entering the north of Gaza. The Israeli army is besieging the north of Gaza again, but now, it’s harder because the ground invasion is ongoing and people are suffering of displacement, starvation, lack of medicine, just everything. The Israeli army is killing every single person in the north of Gaza intentionally.”
When you’re malnourished, you get sick more often. You are more likely to get injured. And the daily hunger pangs are excruciating. Let us imagine facing down our hunger each and every day with no end in sight. Suicide might seem like a better alternative under such conditions.
Clean water is also hard to access. With the crumbling infrastructure, the water systems aren’t functioning for most people in Gaza. The act of getting water each day is an exercise in endurance and luck. In this video, Medo shows us how to “get water the hard way.”
“There are two ways to get water. The easy way is what I showed you in the last video: we get a hose and we fill up the tank with no need to carry anything. The problem with that way though is that… it’s just on our lucky days. The hard way is basically we have to carry these buckets and walk about half a mile, fill them up, then carry them back. Each one of these buckets is around 45 pounds.”
He adds, “I lost around 30 pounds since the beginning of this genocide.”
With all the destruction, Palestinians are displaced, many living in tents or in the rubble left behind. In this video, Aya in Gaza tells of how her family has been continually displaced and they can’t afford it. There are thousands of families facing the same repeated displacement that grinds on the spirit. Imagine your shelter being constantly at risk of attack, of displacement, of structural failure, nothing ever being truly solid under your feet.
In the demolished infrastructure we find dozens of other problems that make living harder. With water and electricity shut off, basic hygiene becomes a more challenging task. Videos from Gaza show toilets to be buckets with plastic bags inside. There are sometimes hoses or some way to wash your hands, but not always guaranteed. According to the U.N analysis, there is one toilet for every 850 people in Rafah, which is significantly less than the one toilet per 20 people standard. Imagine every day being unsure where you’ll be able to use the toilet, when, and how your waste will be disposed of. That’s a permanent layer of stress; there’s no way to avoid the need to go to the bathroom. This also ties into access to period products. People with periods in Gaza struggle to find pads and tampons and therefore are forced to use other materials that aren’t safe. Constant anxiety about personal hygiene— unavoidable and necessary— grinds upon the mind day-after-day, unrelenting. Can you imagine pondering suicide under those circumstances?
With the devastated infrastructure, hospitals are barely functioning, if at all. The U.N “Public Health Situation Analysis” includes,
“As of 1 May 2024, there are 12 of 36 hospitals which are partially functioning, while 70 per cent of primary health care centres not functional (62 out of 88). The hospitals are operating at limited capacity and overwhelmed with patients, grappling with critical shortages of fuel, medicines, supplies, and medical staff.”
In a video, Dr. Rajab paints a picture of the conditions in a hospital in northern Gaza,
“It’s over 8 months and the bombing is still continuing around us. The situation here is getting worse. Today I’m in Almadani hospital. We received a lot of wounded patients from Jabalaya camp. We are suffering every day. No food, no medication. Please help us.”
The end result is suffering. Palestinians are undergoing surgeries, including amputations and C-sections, without anesthesia. The consequence is that a lot of people have become disabled with very little medical support. As Imani, @Crutches&Spice, points out multiple times on her platform, disabled Palestinians are facing an even harsher environment than their able-bodied neighbors because of eugenics. Crutches&Spice, a disability advocate, explains,
“When you are talking about disabled Palestinians, when you are talking about the immigration and asylum process, visibility is not enough. And it can’t be enough. Because no amount of visibility will stop a country from practicing eugenics.”
Crutches&Spice adds in another video,
“Nobody wants disabled people. Nobody wants disabled people in their country. Nobody wants disabled people to immigrate to their country… Most countries have policies and ordinances barring disabled people from moving there… When it comes to evacuating disabled people, we are usually last. And this is why disabled people say that the systems you ignore now, you’re going to want and/or need later.”
Because disabled people are devalued by ableist societies, their lives are seen as expendable— not worth saving. And with the mass death and destruction of hospitals in Gaza, there are fewer people to turn to for help, placing all the labor of survival on the disabled and, if lucky, someone in their family.
A Palestinian journalist on the ground in Gaza, Hind Khoudary, reports about how “thousands of people need to travel to receive their medical treatments” and who are unable to do so with the current violence. She talks about a woman who has cancer and who cannot receive her chemotherapy nor any other medicine she needs to survive. She goes on,
“Palestinians are not dying due to Israeli shelling, airstrikes, helicopters, quadcopters, drones, no, they are also dying of lack of medical treatment. And it feels so bad because no one can do anything about it. Like you’re seeing people dying in front of your eyes.”
In this video, Fatima describes her family’s needs, including her mother who needs medical treatment but can’t access it because the few hospitals that are operating are full. In another video, a young child wishes to see his father walk again, after a double amputation. He says, “We must travel so that my father can receive treatment.”
For people who are disabled or chronically ill, chances of surviving narrow in a war zone. In the face of unimaginable suffering and physical pain, death may be the less painful option.
A seemingly small, yet profoundly painful part of the devastation of war is the loss of pets. Though perhaps a different kind of loss from losing a human being— a family member or friend, when a pet dies, it can be debilitating. Even under the best circumstances. But in a genocide, it may be seen as less important, but the loss of animals does impact people and their mental health.
As explained in “Grief following the loss of an animal: the loss of a pet”,
“When grieving for a pet some people may find that they:
sleep and eat less
have nightmares
feel that they don’t want to go out as much as usual
spend a lot of time thinking about and longing for their pet
imagine they can see their pet, or hear it (e.g. a bark, meow, or chirp).”
Such responses would absolutely influence someone’s mental health after losing a pet. Many people are sharing this kind of loss on social media. Nour specifically mentions her cat in her list of lost loved ones. Bisan, a Palestinian reporter in Gaza, provides regular updates on the war and, amidst all the atrocities, she has also spoken about her cats, who she lost when the war broke out. You can tell how sad she is missing them and just wanting to take care of them. But, as Bisan has said before, there’s nowhere safe in Gaza.
With all this loss, chaos, and uncertainty around you, you hope that you can at least sleep— the one escape from pain you have. But with bombs being dropped, other artillery, collapsing structures, screams and cries, and the sounds of troops you can’t sleep— not during the day, not at night. There is footage on social media of small babies peacefully sleeping one minute, then being startled awake by the loud BOOM of a bomb. Tortured sleep. Sleep deprivation can have devastating long and short term effects. For the sleep deprived, death can seem like the purest kind of rest.
Perhaps one of the most devious and malicious tactics of war— psychological warfare— has a clear impact on mental health. In the article, “War on Gaza: Israeli drones lure Palestinians with crying children recordings then shoot them”, we learn that the IDF is using drones that cry like children in the middle of the night to pull Palestinians out of hiding and shoot them. Imagine not being able to trust what you’re hearing— listening to a child cry, but being afraid to help for fear it might be a trap. Reality becomes so distorted when you can’t trust what you hear and see, which is what makes psychological warfare (torture) so impactful and damaging.
Finally, as we discuss torture, we must consider the detention centers/prisons where Palestinians are being held by the IDF. A Haaretz article, “Palestinian Released from Israeli Prison Describes Beatings, Sexual Abuse, and Torture”, explains what horrors are being committed behind closed doors.
Torture, obviously, is incredibly damaging to us psychologically and physically. This includes sexual violence. In a video from the end of May, 2024, Bisan shares the story of a woman she met who experienced sexual abuse at the hands of the Israeli soldiers.
“Yesterday, I was making a film about the Gazans who were kidnapped by the Israeli soldiers from Gaza and taken to the Israeli prisons. And I interviewed this little, powerful young woman— she was really young— she was telling me how they treated them… She told me that she was with two other women from Gaza blindfolded and handcuffed and moving from one prison to another in a vehicle with a male solider. She was blindfolded, but she could see a little bit under the piece of cloth. She saw that this soldier was touching the other women. She was so scared because he touched the face of the first woman, the lips of the second woman, then he reached her. Her clothes were cut from [the chest] and then she told me that this soldier touched her face, her neck, then her chest. She started crying and I was not shocked. They are slaughtering our children, literally burning us alive— what else to do? They have done everything.”
This is just one story of many of varying degrees of violence. Sexual abuse and rape are like psychological torture. The PTSD from the experience of being tortured could push someone to desperate acts, like suicide. Torture can even shape the suicide itself. In “Suicidal behavior after severe trauma. Part 2: The association between methods of torture and of suicidal ideation in posttraumatic stress disorder”,
“Particularly among PTSD patients with a history of torture, an association was found between the torture methods that the victim had been exposed to, and the suicide method used in ideation or attempts. Blunt force applied to the head and body was associated with jumping from a height or in front of trains, water torture with drowning, or sharp force torture with methods involving self-inflicted stabbing or cutting.”
As disturbing as it is, we must consider how appealing suicide might be in the wake of torture. Interestingly, this goes two ways.
Suicide in the IDF
If we want to get an even broader understanding of suicide on this modern battlefield, we must also look to suicide figures for Israeli military personnel. According to a Haaretz article “The Israeli Soldiers Who Took Their Own Lives While Fighting Hamas, Days After October 7”, ten IDF soldiers have died by suicide since October 7. “Conversations with relatives and professionals suggest that what they saw at the massacre sites destroyed their souls.” Current violence that the IDF soldiers are witnessing and participating in is scarring them in such a way as to trigger suicide ideation.
According to a February 2024 article,
“Around 30,000 Israeli soldiers have called up a mental health hotline since the outbreak on Oct. 7, according to the army. A military statement said that around 85% of the soldiers who sought psychological treatment had returned to active duty. Around 200 soldiers were discharged from the army due to the psychological problems they suffered” from the war, it added.”
Suicide was a mounting problem even before October 7, too. The Times of Israel wrote in January 2023 that “Suicide remained the leading cause of death [among IDF soldiers], with at least 14 soldiers believed to have taken their own lives in 2022, compared to 11 the year prior.” At the time, this was the highest recorded number in five years. Access to guns is a huge contributing factor to suicides in the IDF. 84% of suicides among IDF soldiers involved firearms.
The IDF does have a suicide prevention program, which may have resulted in some success after its implementation in 2006. In addition to restrictions on firearm access, the IDF Suicide Prevention Program consisted of “de-stigmatizing help-seeking behavior, integrating mental health officers into service units, and training commanders and soldiers to recognize suicide risk factors and warning signs.”
Suicide: A Tool of Colonization
Suicide, or more generally self-destruction, is wielded by colonizing powers against Indigenous peoples (and even against dissenting or contrarian members of the colonizing group) as an intentional weapon. From the mind of the colonizer, “If I can convince you to kill yourself, then I get to blame you for it.” It’s a simple yet vicious tactic and one crucial to a genocidal campaign.
As written at the beginning of this piece, we are not here to decide whether or not the war in Gaza is genocide. But let us quickly define genocide so that we can contextualize suicide within it.
According to the United Nations,
“Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:
A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and
A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”
Furthermore, Gregory H Stanton, President of Genocide Watch developed the 10 stages of genocide which explains the different stages which lead to genocide. The ten stages are,
Classification (Us vs Them)
Symbolisation (Visual identification)
Discrimination (Loss of civil rights)
Dehumanization (Loss of human rights)
Organization (Planning the genocide)
Polarization (Splitting the public with propaganda)
Preparation (Self-defense)
Persecution (Segregation with the intent of destruction)
Extermination (Mass murder)
Denial (Evidence destroyed, rejection that the genocide happened)
(All of which Israel has done against the Palestinians.)
The intent of genocide is to wipe out a group of people and their cultures, making suicide an advantageous tool. There’s one thing about suicide that makes it so deadly and effective in the cause of genocide: it spreads. If you lose a loved one to suicide, you become more at risk of suicide yourself.
According to the scholarly article titled, “suicide bereavement and complicated grief”,
“Furthermore, survivors of suicide loss are at higher risk of developing major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicidal behaviors, as well as a prolonged form of grief called complicated grief.”
Though societies can try as they might to hide suicides when they happen, it doesn’t stop the spread. Suicide is like one long chain connecting all these individual lives in a complex web— one that is ever-expanding. If a colonizing force can weaponize suicide, it starts with one, then reaches entire communities and regions beyond.
By instituting harm, colonizers ensure that the pains causing suicide cannot be eradicated.
However, there are some who view suicide itself as a form of resistance to genocide. Is it suicide if it’s protest? Is it idealizing suicide to see it as protest? These kinds of questions have been plaguing the mind of the American public as of late, particularly in light of Aaron Bushnell’s protest against the genocide. On Sunday, February 25, Aaron Bushnell— a U.S serviceman— self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C shouting “Free Palestine” over and over again.
According to an Al-Jezeerah article,
“As Bushnell himself said, self-immolation is nothing “compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine”, where people know all too well how quickly human beings burn.”
Aaron’s sacrifice has people justifiably emotional and injected a sense of urgency to questions about the act: Is it suicide? Is it protest? Is there a difference between suicide and sacrifice? Does it matter? Arguments online and in the news about this dominated several news cycles after Bushnell’s death and will no doubt continue as the war continues.
However, this also raises a question about suicide bombings, which are largely considered terrorist acts because the suicide method is intended to also kill others. Israel is no stranger to suicide bombings. According to the article “Suicide Bombing Attacks”,
“Between November 2000 and May 2003, 71 suicide bombing attacks were carried out in Israel.”
But suicide bombings were common long before then. From “A short history of suicide bombing”,
“In 1994, around 10 years after suicide attacks began in Lebanon, Palestinian groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad began using suicide bombers against Israeli targets... Many of these attacks were deliberately targeted at civilians. Over time, at least 742 civilians were killed and 4,899 were wounded by suicide bombings in Israel and the Palestinian Territories according to data from the University of Chicago.”
Furthermore,
“Mahmoud Ahmed Marmash, a twenty-one-year old suicide bomber who blew himself up near Tel Aviv in May 2001 explained such a decision on a video before his mission: ‘I want to avenge the blood of the Palestinians, especially the blood of the women, of the elderly, and of the children, and in particular the blood of the baby girl Iman Heijo, whose death shook me to the core…. I devote my humble deed to the Islamic believers who admire the martyrs and who work for them.’”
Sentiments like this from suicide bombers reveal how deeply impactful the occupation of Palestine is on mental health. The suicide bombings are considered resistance— glamorized in some circles, demonized in others. The suicides bloom from the roots of genocide. A worthy fight with a cruel weapon and a cruel outcome, neither to be idealized nor ignored.
Suicide as resistance to genocide can also be seen in numerous examples of women in different war zone environments who choose suicide rather than be sexually assaulted. According to a blog post by a professor who teaches about the Armenian genocide titled, “Is Suicide a Form of Resistance to Genocide? Suicide during the Armenian Genocide and in Syria”,
“[In] Michael Weiss, Roy Gutman, and Alex Rowell’s article “Women in Aleppo Choose Suicide Over Rape, Rebels Report,” in The Daily Beast (December 13, 2016). The authors quote Abdullah Othman, the head of the Consultative Council in the Levant Front, one of the largest rebel groups in Aleppo. He explains that “this morning 20 women committed suicide in order not to be raped.” Once again, in the context of genocide (which is absolutely the case in Syria), we find another example of women deciding to commit suicide to avoid sexual assault. What are we to make of this?”
According to the “Public Health Situation Analysis”,
“The number of reported cases of femicide recorded between January and September 2020 in the oPt stands at 24, the same number as in all of 2019. Many women in Gaza see suicide as a ‘way out’ of their particularly oppressed position in society and the lack of options to escape violence and pressures in the home.”
As grim as these examples are, they make us question suicide, our morals and ethics having to do with it, how we feel about it, and even how we feel about ourselves in our own bodies— our own lives. What if suicide is more complicated than I think? How will I handle that? We must each confront these questions.
As we’ve seen, suicide is both a tool of colonization and a form of resistance against it. A poison and an antidote.
What do we do about it?
As famously put by Avatar Kyoshi from Avatar: The Last Airbender, “Only justice will bring peace.” The only solution that pulls suicide by the roots in Gaza is liberation.
From Paulo Frerei’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”,
“As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they lost in the exercise of oppression. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors. The latter, as an oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves.”
From the same article from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs,
“Dr. Al-Masri explains, ‘The stress here for people is long-term and continues to increase every year. It won’t go away until you address the root causes.’”
The root of the war is genocide. The root of suicide in Gaza is genocide. Justice is the way to uproot genocide in Gaza and all over the world. Justice is the way to uproot suicide, too. Not just justice for the individual, but also for families and entire communities and nations.
Free Palestine. Ceasefire now. Protest, boycott, call your representatives and ask that they use their power to push for a ceasefire and Palestinian liberation.
More generally, to prevent suicide, we must make what’s invisible visible. Talking about suicide openly and frankly can be difficult, but it’s worth it to help someone feel not so alone. When your struggle is invisible, you feel isolated— trapped with it. During a genocide, suicide can become even less visible, compared to all the mass devastation happening around the suicidal person. Especially if the suicides are swept under the rug for numerous other reasons. Talking about suicide may not be the solution, but it’s a critical part of prevention.
I want to end this in a way that honors Gaza and her beauty. Watch this video of Gaza before October— a place full of color, life, vibrancy, delicious food, history, and kind people. Though the devastation of Gaza we are seeing now may feel terminal, the old Gaza is not gone. She is alive in her people. And can be brought back again. Not by Israeli developers and builders who now look upon the decimated Gaza as prime real estate. But, yes, brought back by the Palestinians. Only with their return and renewal can Gaza shine like she used to. We must remember, if there is a ceasefire, we can’t rest until Palestinians are home and safe permanently. Only justice will bring peace.
Any profits made from this article will go towards helping those in Palestine. Donations will be made to “Help Asmaa’s family evacuate from Rafah (Gaza).”