A generational crisis: Israel's most vulnerable children pay war's steepest price

The numbers offer a sobering starting point. According to Israeli government statistics, even before the latest Iran-Israel war, nearly one in three Israeli youth from kindergarten through high school were considered to be on the at-risk spectrum.

These are not statistics about a distant front. They are about children in classrooms, teenagers in youth programs, and young adults who were only just beginning to find their footing.

For at-risk youth – those from abusive homes, impoverished families, or unstable living situations – the psychological toll of sustained conflict is not simply added stress. It is a compounding of wounds that were already open.

For young people already carrying the weight of difficult family backgrounds or personal trauma, the constant rhythm of alerts, military escalation, and collective grief creates a psychological environment in which recovery becomes nearly impossible.

What has helped, practitioners and young people themselves report, is deceptively simple: structure and human connection. Experts emphasize that a sense of stability and routine is essential for children in conflict zones – going to school consistently, having regular family meals, and having a reliable place to sleep at night.

For Gal, 25, who grew up in a boarding school and joined Orr Shalom’s program for graduates of foster care/boarding schools, keeping a routine and speaking to people is what has helped him get through this period. He tries maintaining a schedule with fierce intentionality – waking up at the same hour, attending appointments even when the effort feels impossible, and reaching out to speak with multiple trusted people rather than retreating into isolation or into the infinite scroll of conflict content online. Gal said that he discovered his ability to create deep, meaningful relationships – something he did not know about himself before the war.

Wartime has a particular cruelty for young people who were already financially fragile.

For teenagers who were working part-time jobs to support struggling families, for young adults who were piecing together informal incomes, and for those who depended on community youth programs now facing budget cuts, the economic contraction has been felt in every meal skipped and every application form left unfilled.

The Israel National Council for the Child has noted that the state budget passed in early 2025 appeared to cut essential initiatives, including programs for at-risk children and youth, at precisely the moment those programs are most needed. For young people navigating this pinch, youth workers and counselors have consistently offered the same counsel: Ask for help.

Israel’s network of welfare services, municipal social departments, and NGOs – stretched as they are – still exists, and accessing it is not a sign of failure. It is the only rational response to an irrational situation. Equally, many young adults who had enrolled in university or vocational training have made the difficult but pragmatic decision to postpone their studies, not from indifference but because survival – financial and emotional – must come first.

Perhaps the least discussed and most painful dimension of this crisis is one that rarely makes headlines: For many at-risk youth, the threat is not outside the door but inside the home.

Children and teenagers who come from homes where a parent or guardian was the source of their original trauma – through abuse, neglect, addiction, or violence – have found themselves thrust back into proximity with those individuals. Evacuations, displacement, and the collapse of normal social structures have, for some, undone years of careful distance.

For young people caught in this situation, like Eden, 22, who grew up in one of Orr Shalom’s group homes, the advice is hard but clear: Try to stay calm, avoid escalating confrontations when possible, and get out as soon as it is safe to do so.

Reaching out to a trusted social worker, teacher, or youth worker – even a single text message – can be the first step toward reconnecting with a safety net. The instinct to endure silently is understandable. But silence, in these circumstances, is a wall, not a shield.

There is a particular type of fear that belongs only to those who watch someone they love go to war. For the young siblings, children, and partners of IDF soldiers and reservists, the daily reality of the conflict is not abstract. It arrives in the long silences between WhatsApp messages, in the way a phone notification can change the temperature of a room, in the ritual of checking the news with dread rather than curiosity. By July 2024, some 612 children had already lost one parent serving in the security forces, with three losing both.

For at-risk youth, whose relationship with stability and trust may already have been fractured, this particular fear can be especially destabilizing. The person who may have represented safety – an older brother, a parent who had turned things around, a mentor figure – is now somewhere they cannot be reached and may not return. Mental health workers acknowledge that this is one of the hardest areas in which to offer simple prescriptions.

For Israel’s at-risk youth, resilience is not a national trait that automatically applies. It is something that must be actively built, tended, and supported – by professionals, by communities, and by a government that understands the cost of neglecting it now.

The children and young people living through this war did not choose it. But they will carry it. The question Israel must ask itself – now, not later – is what kind of foundation it is building beneath them while they do.■