In recent months, the Supreme Court in Jerusalem has been at the very epicenter of a huge public storm. Indeed, last week it became something of a pilgrimage site, when all 15 justices held an open hearing on the government’s law to repeal the reasonableness standard – effectively ending judicial review in Israel. A few months before that, in late May, far from the eyes and attention of the public, the same court held a different, unprecedented hearing, the background of which is as incomprehensible as it is absurd. Dozens of former Israeli prisoners of war, hurt and desperate after many years of neglect and disregard, took their case to the High Court, to the chamber of chief justice Esther Hayut, hoping for justice – no matter how delayed.

As we approach the 50^th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the most terrible of all the conflicts Israel has fought, the media is full of special reports and coverage. But as we watch these shows and read these features, there is one headline, taken from a legal document, that we should stop for a moment to read and internalize: Former IDF Prisoners of War versus the State of Israel, the Defense Ministry and its Rehabilitation Department.

Igal Kohlany is the chairman of Awake at Night, the nongovernmental organization which advocates for former POWs and which submitted the High Court petition.

“This is our last battle,” he told Shomrim. “We’re now old men and there are fewer and fewer of us. There’s a feeling that they’re just waiting for the POWs to die and the numbers are indeed dwindling. Every month, we lose another two or three.”

In their petition, the former POWs argue that they have been forced into a war for their very survival, beginning with the captivity by enemy forces and then continuing after their release and return home. They want the state to recognize the physical and emotional harm that they have suffered. They argue that what they received from the state was too little and too humiliating – and that it did them a huge disservice. “This is the state’s last chance to do its duty by us,” the petition says,” to ensure a minimal standard of dignified living for the surviving former POWs, before it’s too late.”

Kohlany’s testimony is unequivocal. “They told us: Too bad you didn’t come back in coffins. The whole top of the army brass had the same approach then: "You were wrong to surrender, why didn’t you struggle, why didn’t you fight down to the last bullet?”

‘They told us: Too bad you didn’t come back in coffins’

There are currently around 600 former POWs in Israel who are recognized as such by the defense establishment. Around half of them are recognized as disabled IDF veterans, most of whom served in the Yom Kippur War, during which 301 Israeli soldiers and officers were captured by the enemy. Most of them were held by the Egyptians, others in Syria and a handful in Lebanon.

On their return to Israel, the Yom Kippur War POWs were given a very warm reception. It was almost a day of national celebration, which let the traumatized population forget for a few moments about the more than 2,600 fatalities, the 7,000 injured soldiers and the total shock that enveloped the country when the failures of the war were revealed. The country’s top leaders, including Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, all came to greet the POWs, who were handed flowers as planes flew overhead in salute.

Kohlany, who was 19 years old when he was captured by the Egyptians, says that the released POWs started expressing concern even on the flight that brought them back to Israel. “We were afraid of what they would do to us in Israel. At that time, being a POW was not part of the Israeli war ethos. We were brought up to know that one does get captured.”

At the airport, the POWs were re-inducted and even handed a leaflet specially produced by the IDF. In it, there was information about the outcome of the war, but also about the Military Justice Law, which strongly condemns surrender without a direct order and revealing secrets to the enemy while in captivity.

Prof. Avi Uri, who served as a medic in the reserves and was captured by Egyptian forces at the Suez Canal when he was 25 years old, remembers walking around with that leaflet tucked into the pocket of his shirt. “Our feet had not even touched the ground yet and we were already being threatened and told that anyone who gave up secrets would be punished,” he recalls. “Re-inducting us was one of the biggest mistakes they made: they put us in uniform and army boots and threw special anti-lice shampoo on us, as if we were lepers.”

In most cases, the families of the POWs were asked not to come to the airport to greet them and the soldiers themselves were sent home in taxis. They were given two or three days to be with their families, after which they were ordered to report to the Mivtahim sanitarium in Zichron Ya’akov. From that moment on, they say, there was a dramatic change in the state’s treatment of them. The sanitarium had been converted into a closed military base, surrounded by barbed-wire fences and military police. The POWs, who once again had their freedom taken away, were subjected to lengthy security interviews, along with medical and psychological examinations. Years later, many of them said that at the time, they felt as if they were being blamed for having been captured, they were treated as if they performed an act of treason, cowardice and were unprofessional. Some of them experienced the interrogations as humiliating and felt that they were being treated as suspects. In some cases, POWs were even threatened with court martial. There were POWs who called this period their “second captivity,” saying that it was even more traumatic than interrogations by the enemy. Some got the impression that the IDF would have preferred them dead rather than alive.

Kohlany’s testimony is unequivocal. “They told us: Too bad you didn’t come back in coffins. The whole top of the army brass had the same approach then: "You were wrong to surrender, why didn’t you struggle, why didn’t you fight down to the last bullet?”

Some of the POWs, who were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, were sent to Beit Nissan in Netanya, where they were injected with pentothal – a controversial pharmaceutical treatment which returns the patient to the experience and removes their mental defenses in the hope of allowing them to process traumatic content. Years later, it emerged through various declassified documents that the physicians who were brought in to treat the POWs did so according to the best of their understanding and knowledge. It is now patently clear, however, that the expertise was lacking and that the state was not prepared to treat the hundreds of POWs who returned to Israel in very poor physical and emotional condition.

Many of the POWs felt that they were being silenced. Others cocooned themselves in silence. “For many years, no one talked about captivity,” says Kohlany. “Each POW dealt with it alone and there was a total disconnect. We didn’t talk about it with each other or even internally, with ourselves.”

Prof. Avi Uri, who served as a medic in the reserves and was captured by Egyptian forces at the Suez Canal when he was 25 years old, remembers walking around with that leaflet tucked into the pocket of his shirt. “Our feet had not even touched the ground yet and we were already being threatened.”

The Toughest Interrogation: ‘At The Hands of Our Own People’

These tough feelings did not dissipate when the POWs were allowed to return to their homes. They were publicly disparaged, in part because of the Israeli myth that providing the enemy with information while in captivity was tantamount to treason. “The freed POWs felt like  they had failed in their military mission and that they were traitors because they talked, but most POWs, in the end, will talk. Occasionally there are exceptions who manage to stick to their cover story. POWs cannot abide by the instructions included in the Military Justice Law,” says Tel Aviv University’s Prof. Zahava Solomon, an expert in traumatic stress and psychiatric epidemiology, who has been studying the case of Israeli POWs from the Yom Kippur War for the past three decades. “The situation was so bad that there were cases of people getting married shortly after they were released from captivity and didn’t even tell their brides that they had been POWs. It was a kind of stigma. Released POWs continued to be ashamed for many years.”

“If a soldier came back with an injury – having lost an arm or a leg – he would be treated,” says Uri. “If POWs came back in a psychotic state or with severe combat shock, they were shut away in a mental health institution and hidden from public view. Everything that preceded the Yom Kippur War and everything that followed it, can be summed up in one word: disregard.”

In many cases, the IDF did not free the POWs from military service and did not even deduct the number of days they spent in captivity from the length of their military service, which exacerbated even further the sense of contempt and humiliation that they continued to feel from the defense establishment.

Kohlany recalls the ceremony in 1974 at which soldiers from his unit were awarded their decorations for having fought in the Yom Kippur War. He was the only soldier who did not get a decoration, he says. When he asked his commanding officer to explain, he was simply told that he was not on the list of recipients. “Everyone was lined up to get their war medals and I sat to one side, like a stagehand. The officer read out the names of the recipients but I wasn’t among them.”

That’s not all. During the course of the interview, Kohlany shows Shomrim documents from his personal IDF file, where there is a note from that time saying: Do not promote. “You read that and you understand their line of thought,” he says. “They thought that we might be traitors, spies. That comment appears in the files of other POWs, too.”

Despite everything, Kohlany continued to serve in the IDF and even fought in the Lebanon War in 1982. “I was always deployed to the front lines. Only after I turned 40 did I ask to be released from reserve duty.”

Like Kohlany, Prof. Uri also continued to serve in the IDF, even though he had returned from captivity with severe wounds. “When I got back to Israel, my military profile was lowered and they insisted I continue to serve. Of all the places in the world, they wanted me to be a doctor in a military prison. I refused.” In the end, Uri was sent to work in the military rehabilitation unit. Since then, he has become a world-renowned expert in the field and served as director of the Rehabilitation Unit at Tel Hashomer Hospital and at the Reuth Rehabilitation Hospital in Tel Aviv.

In the first years after the war, some former POWs turned to the IDF’s rehabilitation unit after suffering emotional distress. In their High Court petition, senior defense officials are quoted as saying that there was a deliberate policy in the Defense Ministry in the 1970s of rejecting requests for psychological treatment. The system “threw them under the bus and totally ignored their distress,” according to one of the officials quoted. Anyone who sought such treatment was forced to undergo an additional interrogation, during which there were more extreme expressions of distrust.

“I was interrogated three times and each was tougher than the previous,” said psychologist Dr. David Szenes at the time. “The first was when the Egyptians interrogated me during my captivity; the second was the IDF interrogation in Zichron Ya’akov after we returned. That was being interrogated by our own forces, so it was harder than being interrogated by the Egyptian enemy. The third interrogation was the hardest and most painful of all. It was the interrogation by physicians from the medical panel of the IDF’s rehabilitation unit, which I had asked for treatment from.”

“If POWs came back in a psychotic state or with severe combat shock, they were shut away in a mental health institution and hidden from public view," says Uri. "Everything that preceded the Yom Kippur War and everything that followed it, can be summed up in one word: disregard.”

‘The POWs Felt Abandoned Again’

In 1992, researchers at Tel Aviv University started to examine the state of POWs from the Yom Kippur War. The first wave of research was spearheaded by professors Solomon and Uri, along with Prof. Yuval Neria. This comprehensive and unique study is still ongoing and is now led by Prof. Solomon, who won the Israel Prize for social work. The most recent stage of the study, which began in 2020, examines the physical and emotional cost of being held in captivity.

Solomon has no doubt that the trauma suffered by former POWs is unique – it is ongoing trauma, caused by the acts of people, which leads to Complex PTSD (CPTSD). “The group of former POWs suffered from double trauma,” she explains. “Most of them were captured after very heavy fighting, so they were already traumatized by the war itself. Being taken captive is extremely traumatic for several reasons: it’s a personal trauma – the captive has a face and there is a personal connection with him; the person giving you food and guarding you is also an abusive figure.

“They underwent terrible things, like extreme torture, interrogations, isolation; almost all of them were subjected to mock executions, some of them were sexually assaulted, all of which are extremely humiliating experiences. Are you thirsty? They pour water on the floor and tell you to lick it up. Not all of them went through all of that, but they all suffered extremely terrible things.”

Even in the first years of the study, researchers found that the trauma associated with being taken captive in war requires specialized treatment and that this trauma manifests itself in many different long-term psychological, cognitive and behavioral disorders. Without suitable treatment, researchers warned, the condition of the former POWs would deteriorate.

According to Solomon, the IDF’s Rehabilitation Unit agreed to a proposal put forward by researchers in the mid-1990s and reached out to former POWs in an effort to gauge their condition and offer them treatment. “Until that point, only a handful of them approached the Defense Ministry,” she says. “They did listen to us and were active, but since then they have done nothing and the former POWs once again felt abandoned and neglected.”

Israeli society underwent something of a change in the middle of the 1990s and there was growing public interest in the former POWs, who started to give interviews to the media, wrote their own stories or were invited to conferences organized by various IDF units. Their stories highlighted the double trauma.

Prof. Uri’s story is similar. He was serving as a medic at Fort Hizayon and saw most of the soldiers serving alongside him brutally murdered. Uri spent five days in the inferno of combat on the southern front, trying to save the lives of the soldiers there, including the commander of the fort. For most of that time, he guarded them in a bunker, with no ammunition, food, water, electricity or sleep.

“Every so often, someone would leave the fort and just disappear, murdered, slain,” he recollects. “When the Egyptians realized that there were live soldiers in the bunker, they threw in smoke grenades and used a flamethrower.” Uri survived for one day, between the bodies of his fallen comrades, before he was taken prisoner. His vocal cords had been burned and he sustained serious lung injuries, as well as respiratory and hearing problems.

“I wasn’t given any medical treatment in the Egyptian prison,” he says. “I looked terrible. I was red and black. Red from the blood on the wounds that I treated myself and black because of the terrible fire that broke out in the fort. I couldn’t swallow or eat, just drink. I weighed 20 kilograms less by the time I got back to Israel.” He is still dealing with some of those injuries to this day.

Higher Risk of Heart Disease, Cancer and Diabetes

In the 1990s, according to Kohlany, former POWs started to clash with the Defense Ministry, “which didn’t understand what we wanted. Mental health wasn’t such an issue back then – and it certainly was not considered a disability. I also decided to submit a claim for all the problems I was having. I knew that I was anxious, angry and that I couldn’t sleep at night. I didn’t know that it was post-trauma.”

In 1998, Kohlany was one of the founders of the Awake at Night NGO, which was named after a documentary by Israeli director Yoav Ben-David, who himself is a former POW. “I went to the homes of former POWs, knocked on their door and asked them if they wanted to organize something together,” he says. “Most of them didn’t want to talk to us. My wife and I would tell them: We’ll wait for 15 minutes outside your home. If you want, come out.”

Did they?

“Usually, the wife would come out and talk about problems at home. We gathered people, we held a conference and we decided to help ourselves. I believe that this is the only instance of an NGO looking after former POWs, rather than the state itself.”

That same year, he says, the Defense Ministry established a committee which “looked on former POWs in a most positive way in relation to PTSD and did not look on them as liars and cheats. Until then, no one even talked about post-trauma. Now, former POWs are recognized as suffering from PTSD and are given psychological counseling. It was a way of rectifying things. They opened the door for us.”

Kohlany says that some former POWs have been recognized by the state as being unable to work and have received stipends due to their inability to earn an income. “Some people were really at rock bottom and the Defense Ministry helped them get up,” he says. And yet, he says “there are some former POWs who even up to this day refuse to approach the Defense Ministry because of the way that they were treated all those years ago”. 

Members of Awake at Night have met with ministers, Knesset members and senior IDF officers. In the Knesset, there have been discussions and several laws have been proposed. The battle for recognition of their suffering bore fruit in 2005, when the government passed a law ensuring payments for former POWs. The 2,250 former POWs who were alive at the time were each guaranteed a monthly stipend of around 1,000 shekels ($261) – now raised to around 1,250 shekels due to inflation – for having been in enemy captivity.

At the same time, the state continued to be skeptical about the connection between certain diseases from which many former POWs suffered and the trauma of being held captive – despite research findings that corroborated their claim of a causal relationship. “In the Western world, there’s no question about the connection between latent physical morbidity and what we went through as prisoners of war,” says Uri. He adds that the United States, for example, passed a law in the early 1980s which granted automatic healthcare coverage for diseases stemming from having been a POW, without having to prove a causal relationship. In Israel, the Rehabilitation Unit is not easily convinced. “In 2015, Prof. Solomon published a study which showed that the experiences of former POWs have a profound effect on their future health. “Even 42 years after the Yom Kippur War, the harm that being a prisoner of war did is extensive, varied and profound,” she wrote. “Former POWs are in a high-risk group not only for psychological disorders, but also for somatic comorbidities including heart disease, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and metabolic syndrome.”

It was at this stage that Solomon uncovered the most depressing finding of all, regarding premature aging and high mortality rates: her study found that the mortality rate among former POWs was four times higher than for soldiers who fought in the Yom Kippur War but were not held captive.

The Defense Ministry partially funded that study and one could be forgiven for thinking that, in light of the findings, it would take a more active role in providing treatment for these people.

“The study was, indeed, very partially funded by the Defense Ministry, but only for the first few years. Our thinking at the time was that, if they had started to take an interest, they would do something with the findings,” Solomon says.

Uri puts things more bluntly. “The Defense Ministry simply ignored the findings,” he says.

Prof. Solomon has no doubt that the trauma suffered by former POWs is unique – it is ongoing trauma, caused by the acts of people, which leads to Complex PTSD (CPTSD). “The group of former POWs suffered from double trauma,” she explains.

The Behind-The-Scenes Investigation

It took the Defense Ministry until late 2019 to agree to the former POWs’ request to set up a commission to examine the connection between being in enemy captivity and increased morbidity. The commission was headed by Prof. Mordechai Shani, the former director general of the Sheba Medical Center, alongside 15 physicians. In July 2020, the commission published its recommendations: recognizing just four of the 15 diseases that were examined – arthropathy, osteoporosis, peripheral neuropathy and cirrhosis of the liver. With regard to the other diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and autoimmune diseases, the commission decided that there was no direct proof linking them to having been a prisoner of war. With regard to cancer, the commission recommended setting up a special committee of oncologists to look into the matter.

A 2021 investigation by Shomrim uncovered what happened behind the scenes and led to the relatively trivial recommendations of the commission. The Defense Ministry, we revealed, ordered members of the commission not to deal with any health issues that stem from or are impacted by emotional disorders, even though the connection between the two had been proven by Israeli and international studies.

The ministry directed the work of the commission and greatly influenced its recommendations. “We were told not to deal with post-trauma… Our hands were tied from every direction,” Shani told Shomrim at the time, admitting also that he is “not at peace with the commission’s recommendations.”

The former POWs read the Shomrim report and were furious. “There’s a sense that we are superfluous to the system,” they told Shomrim at the time, adding that the commission simply ignored the major diseases, like cancer and diabetes. Members of Awake at Night met with representatives of the Defense Ministry and expressed their outrage at the findings.

According to Kohlany, “time is passing but nothing is being done. We sent them several warning letters before filing our petition. Since we didn’t get a response, we went ahead and submitted it.”

Do you know what the reaction was in the Defense Ministry?

“We heard that they were totally taken aback by the petition. The Rehabilitation Unit and the Defense Ministry were shocked. There are some people there who told the heads of the system that everything was under control with the former POWs, and suddenly they were torpedoed by a High Court petition.”

Were you hesitant about filing the petition?

“Not in the slightest. I’ve got nothing against the state. I’ve got something against certain individuals, people in the defense establishment who, over the years, ignored us. How much longer do we have left? We’re in our 70s, 80s and 90s. It’s a disgrace.”

A 2021 investigation by Shomrim uncovered what happened behind the scenes and led to the relatively trivial recommendations of the commission. The Defense Ministry, we revealed, ordered members of the commission not to deal with any health issues that stem from or are impacted by emotional disorders, even though the connection between the two had been proven by Israeli and international studies.

Court tells ministry: Weigh this very seriously

Awake at Night filed its petition with the High Court in September 2022. The former POWs, who are being represented pro bono by attorneys Boaz Ben-Tzur and Elad Peleg, asked the court to issue a conditional order instructing the Defense Ministry to act on three issues. Firstly, to adopt the recommendation of the Shani Commission to increase the monthly stipend to former POWs. Secondly, to set up “with all worthy alacrity” a committee to examine the causal relationship between having been a prisoner of war and contracting diseases in later life, including malignant diseases. Thirdly, to establish “with all worthy alacrity” a committee to examine the causal relationship between having been a prisoner of war and diseases linked to emotional distress – exactly the issue that the Shani Commission declined to examine.

In its petition, the organization details the many failings and injustices over the years, points out that the Shani Commission was “almost devoid of content” and quotes the Shomrim investigation at length.

In December 2020, the state submitted its preliminary response to the petition, writing in its introduction that “over the years, the issue has been examined with an understanding of the unique situation that former POWs are dealing with and the difficulties they experience, and the issue was even covered in primary legislation.” Moreover, the state rejected the POWs’ claim that the state has reneged on promises it made to them in the past.

As for recognizing the causal relationship between captivity and diseases, the state responded that “it would be fitting to make an ethical and fundamental decision regarding the full right to medical treatment for this population, similar to the way that such a right is guaranteed to people with special degrees of disability (100%+).” What the state seems to be suggesting here is full medical coverage, which would satisfy the former POWs’ demands on this issue.

However, just days before a scheduled court hearing in May 2023, the state sent an updated response, stating that the Defense Ministry had swapped its original proposal for a more limited plan and had decided to adopt the same criteria as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the body in the United States that deals with former soldiers. Although the VA had recognized a causal relationship between being a POW and morbidity, its list of diseases was very limited (including anxiety, hypothermia, joint problems and dysentery).

The former POWs were shocked by the ministry’s change of position. “It was only in court that we found out about the new outline, which includes some diseases that are only applicable to East Asia and doesn’t include cancer or diabetes,” says Kohlany.

In this context, Uri adds that he is occasionally asked to write a medical opinion for the courts about former POWs who fell ill with cancer and who sued the Defense Ministry. “They all lost,” he says. “I do not know a single case of a former POW who got the ministry to recognize the connection between captivity and cancer.”

The former POWs are now pinning their hopes on comments by the president of the Supreme Court, Justice Esther Hayut, who ordered the state “to weigh very seriously” its position with regard to providing the former POWs with full medical insurance. At a hearing, a representative of the State Attorney told the court that the Defense Ministry “is meeting with representatives of the petitioners and the NGO to discuss the matter.” To this, Justice Daphne Barak-Erez – who sat in on the hearing, along with Hayut and Justice Ofer Grosskopf – responded: “That’s exactly the problem. They want results.” Barak-Erez also pointed out that “the state and public discourse recognize the fact that this is an issue that has not been properly addressed. That is patently clear and it is regrettable, but since the petition was filed, it seems that we have made certain progress.”

“We are eagerly awaiting the next stage,” says Uri. “This is a country that devours its inhabitants. There is an open wound called former POWs. Why do we even need an NGO? We should not have reached this terrible situation. Why do we need to fight all the time? We are also fighting for the future, in case, God forbid, more soldiers are taken captive.”

“As I see it,” says Prof. Solomon, “the worst thing of all is that the people who sent these kids into battle didn’t take responsibility for them when they returned. The former POWs wanted recognition and respect for years and they didn’t get any. I never imagined a scenario whereby former POWs would sue the Defense Ministry. We can put an end to all this with a generous heart and more progressive thinking. It’s been 50 years and the injustice suffered by the POWs cries out to the heavens.”