IDF Used 2014 Gaza War to Develop Anti-PTSD Tech

Researchers at Tel Aviv University, in cooperation with the Israel Defense Forces, the U.S. military and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, developed a computerized training system to help prevent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after multiple experiments with veterans from the Gaza and Afghanistan wars.

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The technology’s results, published in the Psychological Medicine journal on Tuesday and in Haaretz on Thursday, are the most effective yet, reducing the risk of PTSD by 70 percent.

Soldiers undergo four computerized sessions over a month to change the way they react to traumatic events, based on the assumption that they can be trained to assess threats in a more proportionate way.

“Increasing soldiers’ mental fortitude and reducing the risk of PTSD places the IDF at the forefront of preventive medicine in the field of mental health,” Professor Yair Bar-Haim, one of the lead researchers, told Haaretz.

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Bar-Haim began following soldiers in 2008 — when Operation Cast Lead killed over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza — began training in 2012—when clashes in Gaza flared up again — and checked in on the 800 veterans in 2014 — when over 2,000 Gazans were killed in Operation Protective Edge.

Those that had undergone training had a 2.6 prevalence rate of PTSD, while 7.8 percent of those that did not receive the training were diagnosed with the disorder.

The U.S. military, which helped fund the study, also tested several dozen Afghanistan veterans in Nebraska.

In the 2014 Gaza War, Israel was accused by Gazan doctors of using experimental and banned weapons on Palestinian civilians. DIME munitions, developed by the U.S. Air Force, which contain cancer-causing materials were said to have caused injury to Palestinian civilians on a number of occasions.