HAIFA, Israel — The sound came first. A sharp boom, then a heavy, disorienting silence. On a narrow road in northern Israel, a Hezbollah rocket struck just meters from where Dudi Lev was sitting. It was June 23, 2024. He had been escorting a displaced family back to their damaged home in Metula, helping them recover what they could: documents, photographs, artifacts of their life fractured by war. The mission was brief, he thought. Instead, it changed everything.
The Hezbollah rocket destroyed Lev’s right eye, shattered his hand, crushed his leg, and damaged his hearing. He survived, barely. “I was awake the whole time,” he said recently from an FIDF-funded Beit HaLochem in Haifa, a rehabilitation center for wounded Israeli soldiers. “I felt everything.”
Lev, a former special forces soldier, had returned to combat after October 7, 2023, when Hamas’s attack in the south raised fears of a wider war. Many elite units were redeployed south, leaving limited forces to guard Israel’s northern border. In Metula, Lev and a small group of reservists and veterans of elite IDF units became the town’s and the country’s first and last line of defense.
For months, they operated under near-daily rocket and drone fire, sleeping in abandoned homes and moving cautiously through empty streets. Intelligence reports warned that thousands of Hezbollah fighters were positioned just across the border, ready to replicate Hamas’s Oct. 7th attack. Moments of calm were rare and never fully trusted.
It was during one such lull that Lev was asked to help a family whose home had been destroyed by a Hezbollah rocket. As he and his partner escorted them in an open-air ATV, a missile struck right next to their vehicle. The blast threw Lev to the ground. His partner pulled him to safety, hiding with him in a roadside ditch while waiting for evacuation, unsure whether a follow-up strike or an ambush would follow.
Lev spent days in a coma and more than four months hospitalized at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. “I used to be independent,” he said. “Suddenly, I needed help with everything.” The physical injuries were severe, but the psychological ones, he says, ran deeper.
Now, in early 2026, Lev is focused on a resolution he has set for the new year: to complete his rehabilitation and find a sustainable way to live with his PTSD. At Beit HaLochem, he spends his days relearning how to walk, managing a brace on his leg, and working through the lingering limitations of his right arm. Hearing loss challenges his balance. Alongside physical therapy, he participates in a specialized PTSD treatment program developed by Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), in partnership with Sheba Medical Center.
Lev meets weekly with a trauma psychologist named Michael, learning to untangle layers of trauma, the blast itself, the helplessness of recovery, and grief for the life he lost. “He doesn’t try to fix me,” Lev said. “He gives me the space to be broken without judgment and pushes me to find the solutions to each trial we encounter because he understands how I think and that if I can’t find the solution on my own, I would not be able to accept it.”
Therapy has also helped him reconnect with his children, strained by months of anger and withdrawal. “After the attack, they didn’t know how to approach me,” he said. “And I didn’t know how to approach them.” Now that he can manage his pain, the distance is closing.
Nearly 4,000 soldiers across Israel receive PTSD care through the FIDF–Sheba partnership, some at long-established Beit HaLochem centers, others at sites opened after October 7, 2023. Since the initial Hamas attack, FIDF has funded more than 10 mental health clinics throughout the country. Programs like these, Lev says, are as vital as any surgery or medical intervention. “Surgery kept me alive,” he said. “Psychological support gave me a reason to keep going.”
As 2026 progresses, Lev is measuring progress not in headlines or medals but in small milestones, steps without a brace, moments of calm, conversations with his children, and the ability to plan a life beyond the hospital walls. One day, he hopes to drive Israel’s quiet back roads in a 4×4 with his dog, Echo, discovering stillness in a world he once defended.
For now, his New Year’s resolution is simple and profound: to rebuild, to cope, and to move forward. In that, he is succeeding.
