For children in Israel’s border communities in the North and South, the sound of sirens and rocket fire is not an interruption – it is the background noise of daily life. Now, new research suggests that the psychological cost of that reality is far deeper than previously understood.
Even as the ceasefire with Iran continues to hold, residents of communities along the northern border remain under rocket fire from Hezbollah in Lebanon. For most, it’s something they have become used to, not just from the recent round of fighting but also for decades before that, when the Shi’ite militia sporadically fired into Israeli territory or during previous flare-ups. Many people who grew up in the North’s cities, towns, kibbutzim, and moshavim just internalized the abnormality and went on with their lives.
Over the past two years, a comprehensive study of children living in some of those communities was carried out by the nonprofit organization Israeli Social Platform. It has revealed the disturbing reality of living with nonstop rocket fire, artillery shells, and explosions.
Researchers noted, among the findings of the study, that there has been “a multidimensional decline in the emotional resilience and functioning among Israel’s children and youth.”
Inside the northern conflict zones, 43% of parents with children up to the age of three have reported significant emotional distress in their children, with key symptoms such as heightened startle responses to noise, severe separation anxiety, or sleep disorders.
Among school-aged children and youth, grades one through 12, in regions such as the Golan Heights and the northern town of Ma’alot-Tarshiha, more than 18% of students were observed to suffer from moderate to significant emotional difficulties. Another 30% face attention and concentration issues such as ADHD, attributed to high distractibility caused by ongoing war and chronic anxiety.
Mental health strain
Stress and anxiety are also present in Israel’s South, with data from cities such as Ashkelon suggesting “an urgent need for processing trauma and grief,” the report said.
Some 39% of students who participated in group therapy activities in the region where the Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack were referred to a more “intensive clinical intervention due to emotional flooding and behavioral outbursts used as a defense mechanism against painful content.”
“Since October 7, we are in a situation where children suffer again and again and again, not only from rounds of fighting but because we are embroiled in one long war,” Josef Fertouk, a psychologist who also serves as the Israeli Social Platform’s vice president for strategy and development, told The Jerusalem Report in a recent interview.
The interviews for this story were conducted during the latest war with Iran, when hundreds of ballistic missiles were fired into almost every part of Israel, and thousands of rockets and other projectiles from Lebanon hit sites, mostly in northern Israel.
While in most regions of Israel the danger was reduced due to alerts, shelters, and safe rooms, in northern Israel, where there is little warning time, civilians – evacuated for some 14 months following October 7 – were forced to live in shelters or just with the fear of imminent rocket fire.
Gaps in response
Shaltiel Sebban, the organization’s chief executive officer, said, “It is more critical than before; the need is now bigger than ever, not only because we are in another war but because of what the children went through even before this latest round.
“These children and youth have not yet returned to track, and they need our help,” he said, adding that “the goal is not only to return them to pre-October 7 but to help them grow, help the North grow and the South grow, and allow these children to overcome what happened and learn from it. It is a national challenge.”
Sebban and Fertouk say that, based on the extreme findings of their clinical research into the traumas of young people living in such extreme conditions, they have developed an ever-evolving program aimed at providing support and assistance for children, their families, and those who work with them on a daily basis.
With the situation on the ground developing so rapidly, the two say that the government is struggling to keep up with the needs, and treatment for children, youth, their parents, and teachers is limited.
“There will always be not enough money to give treatment – that is a fact,” Fertouk said. “The need is always bigger and bigger, and it is even more important and critical to manage the scarce resources in order to see who exactly needs what.
“The goal of our study is to create synchronization among all the bodies operating in the field so they do not give double funding,” he said, emphasizing that the program they are developing is being built with a foundation of philanthropic support from the Jewish Federations of North America, which include the Jewish Federation of Toronto, the St. Paul Federation, the Arison Foundation, the Edmond J. Safra Foundation, the Friedberg Foundation, the Rochlin Foundation, and the Perimont Education Initiative.
“One of the critical things here is the role of philanthropy and Diaspora Jewry,” Fertouk explained. “It needs to be a catalyst or accelerator in places the government, because it is a time of emergency, currently cannot deal with.”
The surveys and resulting data collected by the Israeli Social Platform enable decision-makers to channel their energy and resources to the people and places that are really in need, Fertouk said.
“Creating databases for data-based decision-making is complex – the whole world of therapy, mental health treatment, is challenged when it comes to data-based work,” he said. “And because this is an emergency situation, the government is not succeeding at all in doing this, and its precious resources allocated to resilience end up going to those who shout the loudest.”
Fertouk gives the example of the North, where the situation and needs are changing daily.
“How can we make decisions about resilience responses and resources according to the current situation for the children when what we are talking about today is not the same as what it was two or three years ago?” he said. “The state is not there yet because it is hard to organize quickly for things like this.... It needs help from philanthropy – foundations and organizations – that can be the accelerator for these things.”
Fertouk cited the community of Ma’aleh Yosef near the border with Lebanon and said, “We identified that among all children in daycare frameworks, 40% needed individual intervention in child development issues.... That is much higher than the average in Israel, and it showed the depth of the crisis those children experienced.
“Everyone knows that children experienced difficulties; everyone knows some lived in shelters for a year. But when you see the number that 40% need intervention, it gives much more weight when working with decision-makers to allocate resources, open services that did not exist before,” he said.
The Israeli Social Platform, which until now has focused on those living in border regions, hopes that with support and additional financing, it will be able to expand and begin researching the needs of the country’s children in other areas. After the war with Iran affected populous metropolitan areas such as Tel Aviv, Fertouk and Sebban said it is essential.
“The truth is, we are very worried,” Sebban said. “The fear is that we can have a generation that is totally lost, young people who spent long periods of time in shelters surrounded by missiles and booms.”
To confront the dire situation that he fears will now arise out of the past two and a half years of war, Sebban concluded that it is essential for everyone – from supportive Jewish communities abroad to local authorities to the government – “to join in and address the needs together.”
It’s the only way to solve the crisis, he said.■