A Corgi Named Joya and a Border Policeman's Way Back

Gabriel Chen is 28, and for years after his service with Israel’s Border Police he lived the way the job had taught him to: watchful, braced, never quite off duty. In an account given to The Press Service of Israel (TPS-IL), he described a service defined not by one catastrophic day but by accumulation: operation after operation in the West Bank, the territory Israeli officials call Judea and Samaria, with riots, live fire, stones and petrol bombs, and injuries that came more than once and healed more slowly each time.

“I was in situations of immediate mortal danger again and again,” he said. “It wasn’t just one event; it was a sequence.” The alertness that kept him alive in the field did not switch off at home. Sleep fragmented and then largely stopped. Sounds pulled him back into memories. Friends fell away. At his lowest, he said, a consultation with a psychiatrist reached the point where assisted dying in Europe was mentioned aloud. “Those words didn’t sound like a solution to life, but a reflection of total despair.”

What the Border Police does, and why its people come home strained

The Border Police, known in Hebrew as Magav, is the gendarmerie branch of the Israel Police: roughly 8,000 officers and conscripts who are trained in combat, counter-terrorism and riot control as well as ordinary policing, and who are deployed mainly along borders, in rural districts, in Jerusalem and across the West Bank. It is a police force whose daily working environment looks more like a military one, which is the context for the kind of repeated exposure Chen described.

An army-sized mental health caseload

His case sits inside a much larger picture. Citing Israel’s Defence Ministry, the TPS-IL report said more than 31,000 service members had been treated for mental health problems including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety since October 2023. Separately, the ministry’s rehabilitation department told the Times of Israel in December 2025 that around 22,000 wounded personnel had entered rehabilitation since the start of the war, and that some 58 per cent of them were dealing with PTSD or other mental health conditions, a caseload the ministry said it was funding with roughly $1.27 billion earmarked for mental health treatment alone. The report also cited a survey released in December, which it did not name, finding that one in three Israelis said they needed professional psychological support.

Four short legs

Chen entered a therapeutic halfway house called Bayit Mazen. There the charity Belev Echad stepped in, not with another treatment plan, but with a Cardigan Welsh Corgi named Joya: short legs, oversized ears, no military bearing whatsoever. The mismatch was the point.

“In one of the most mentally complex places I’ve ever been, this dog became my anchor,” Chen said. “He is a quiet, non-judgmental presence.” Joya followed him through the house, sat beside him in silence and came with him to support gatherings with other wounded personnel. “He senses changes in me that I don’t even notice. When I’m about to dissociate or panic, he presses against me, stops me, and forces me to breathe.”

The dog also imposed a schedule. Walks, food, attention: small obligations to another living thing that pulled Chen back out of the house.

Belev Echad was founded in 2010 by Rabbi Uriel Vigler and his wife Shevy after they heard wounded soldiers speak at a Manhattan synagogue, and now runs a rehabilitation centre in Kiryat Ono near the Sheba Medical Centre offering some eighteen programmes, from hydrotherapy and occupational therapy to sessions with therapy dogs; JNS reported in January 2026 that about 2,000 wounded personnel were registered with it. The TPS-IL report said the organisation has arranged several hundred more support animals for security personnel in similar situations.

“Gabriel risked his life time and again in Judea and Samaria to protect us,” Vigler said. “When heroes return with invisible wounds, we cannot abandon them.”

Chen is careful not to describe any of it as a cure. “It’s not magic; it’s a process,” he said. “A delicate process of returning to life. This didn’t just help my rehabilitation: it gave me back my will to live.”

What is still unclear

The account is Chen’s own and was not independently verified; the report gives no clinical diagnosis, no treatment timeline and no detail of what other therapy he received alongside the dog. It does not identify the December survey it cites on Israelis seeking psychological support, and it does not say how Belev Echad selects or trains the animals it places, or what follow-up the placements receive.