Some 6,621 complaints were filed in 2025 by IDF soldiers against the military for various kinds of mistreatment, IDF Ombudswoman Brig.-Gen. (res.) Racheli Tevet Wiesel announced on Monday in her office’s annual report on the subject.
Complaints in 2025 ranged from deficient vehicle defenses to racism, from blocking medical attention for certain soldiers to invasion of privacy, and from abusing military drivers for personal trips to unreasonable delays in granting security clearances, she wrote.
In 2025, 6,615 complaints were dealt with, keeping pace essentially with the number of complaints filed.
Of the 6,621 new complaints, 3,134 were filed by rank-and-file mandatory service soldiers, 1,269 by reservists, 965 by career officers, 847 by personnel in non-IDF sections of the defense establishment, and another 406 were other assorted complaints.
The volume of complaints was comparable to the 6,777 filed in 2024, with the most noteworthy trend being a 40% spike in complaints by career officers compared to two years ago.
While mandatory service complaints remained the largest issue, the relative reduction in reservist complaints and the relative spike in career officer complaints made this issue more noteworthy for this year’s report.
Typically, career officers file fewer complaints either because they have better conditions to start with, find it easier to address their complaints with superiors with whom they have a closer-to-equal relationship, or have greater personal resilience to handle adversity in the military than younger, less experienced soldiers.
In contrast, during the two years of war, when interest groups sprang up to defend the huge mass of mandatory service soldiers or the still large mass of reservists, career officers felt the least supported.
They felt, in many instances, that the military burdened them with additional duties to avoid arguments with reservists or mandatory soldiers, let alone with the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) sector, which the government has made no real attempt to draft in larger numbers.
Fifty-eight percent of the complaints filed by career officers were found to be justified, as were 52% of the total number of complaints overall. Of that 52%, 18% of issues have already been corrected or are in the process of being corrected.
This higher percentage of justified complaints by career officers is consistent with this group only complaining in clearly problematic situations and having an unambiguous sense of how the army generally operates and should operate.
Thirty-one percent of career officers complained specifically about low pay.
In cases in which the Defense Ministry did not find a complaint justified, due to some of the complaints presented lacking a way of establishing what was true between two contradictory narratives (the alleged victim’s complaint against the alleged offender), there are times when the ombudswoman gets involved.
For example, the ombudswoman said that if a large volume of unprovable individual complaints are filed against one commander, she may intervene with that commander’s superior.
In one such case, the commander was eventually fired from their position after additional scrutiny by the Defense Ministry revealed additional problematic behavior by the same individual.
Complaints specific to reservists have included releases from duty with improper documentation, incorrect documentation of the number of days served, and underpayment of salary or other rights and perks due to errors in the documentation system.
New recruits to the IDF – as usual – complained about overly long entry processes, including burdensome evaluations of their psychological fitness to serve as soldiers.
IDF commanders accused of racist comments
Regarding racism, most of the complaints do not address open or official racism per se, such as being excluded from a job in the army due to issues of race.
Rather, there are cases of humiliation, when a commander might call a dark-skinned soldier various politically incorrect or disparaging racial slurs or make some other provocative comment to a soldier with some other ethnic background, such as that they “look like a terrorist.”
According to the ministry, there were cases in which certain commanders repeated such behavior, and complaints were made to them, but they ignored them until official complaints were filed with the Defense Ministry.
In yet another case, a soldier filed a complaint that a reprimand from a mid-level commander had left him depressed and considering hurting himself, and when he told his commander, the response had been, “So commit suicide. Take your weapon and commit suicide.”
At the time, the senior brigade commander had verbally reprimanded the mid-level commander.
However, the Defense Ministry said that an additional, more official reprimand was added to the mid-level commander’s permanent file to impact that commander’s future career path and the perception of the severity of what they had done.
Another commander assaulted a soldier while they were deployed in Lebanon.
The soldier’s pant leg was not properly arranged with his boot, leading the angry commander to cut off part of the sticking-out portion of the soldier’s pants. During the cutting motion, the commander also partially cut into the soldier.
This was done in front of the entire unit and led to the commander being court-martialed.
Many soldiers of all backgrounds complained that the IDF has been inconsistent or oppressive on the issue of allowing them to take leave and vacations abroad during the wars
This was highly problematic because the soldiers actually needed vacations more than during the pre-war era, given the length, intensity, and trauma of their rounds of lethal operational fighting.