Israel soldier shoots himself on military base

An Israeli soldier shot himself dead inside a military base in the north of the country today.

According to Israeli sources, the soldier was taken by plane to Rambam Hospital in Haifa, where doctors pronounced him death.

The Israeli army said it had opened an investigation into the incident.

Suicide was the main cause of death among Israeli soldiers in 2016, the Times of Israel reported last year.

Read: 16 Israeli soldiers committed suicide in 2017

Fifteen soldiers – all of them male – committed suicide in 2016, the same number as the year before and the year before that, according to a senior official in the army’s Manpower Directorate, the newspaper reported.