Political candidates agreed during an ICAR Collective webinar that the focus should extend beyond identifying symptoms and responding to mental health crises in children to preventing those crises whenever possible
Israel Defense Forces Capt. Israel Ben-Shitrit was seriously injured while fighting in Khan Yunis. From the helicopter on the way to the hospital, despite his wounds, he called his wife to tell her what had happened. In the background, he heard his daughter call out: “Dad, do you still have hands?”
“I did not really understand the question,” recalled Ben-Shitrit, who is now running in the upcoming election on the Yisrael Beitenu ticket.
He spoke earlier this month at a special webinar on addressing trauma among children and adolescents, organized by the ICAR Collective. The event brought together political candidates to explore how they and their parties would address the mental health consequences of the war, particularly among Israel’s younger generation.
While their approaches differed, most of the platforms presented during the webinar described Israel as facing a national mental health crisis, with children and young people among those deeply affected. They also largely agreed on the need for a central body to coordinate and take responsibility for the country’s response to this national trauma.
Ben-Shitrit’s wife was by her husband’s side during surgery. When she returned home, he said their daughter asked her the same question. His wife explained that Ben-Shitrit had been wounded in the shoulder, legs, and other parts of his body, but that everything would be okay. And, yes, he still had his hands.
“My daughter said, ‘Good, because Dad promised he would keep hugging me,’” Ben-Shitrit said. “That is when I truly understood that the children are wounded too. These children are fighters no less than the soldiers themselves.”
I truly understood that the children are wounded too. These children are fighters no less than the soldiers themselves.
According to data shared by ICAR, some 19,407 children have been directly exposed to traumatic events since October 7, 2023. Thirty-seven percent of them are under the age of six.
But the number of children affected by the war is far greater. About 300,000 children have parents who have served more than 30 days of reserve duty since October 7. Others have been affected by evacuation, a parent’s prolonged absence, disruptions to their schooling, or the ongoing tension they experience at home.
Moreover, 85% of parents report a worsening of their children’s emotional and psychological symptoms since the outbreak of the war, according to ICAR. Forty percent of children are experiencing sleep disturbances, irritability, and restlessness, while 28% are displaying outbursts of anger and aggression that they did not exhibit before the war.
The dropout rate has also increased by approximately 30% since the start of the war.
Research conducted primarily between 2023 and 2025 found a 90% surge in urgent psychiatric assessments of children and adolescents at Schneider Children’s Medical Center, from 580 cases to 930. Fourteen children died by suicide in 2023, according to the National Council for the Child, an increase of 40% compared with 2022 and 25% compared with 2021.
At the same time, Israel faces a shortage of mental health professionals. By the end of 2023, the Ministry of Health reported 978 certified psychiatrists in Israel, of whom only 299 specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry.
Now, the country needs a coordinated response, according to MK Moshe (Kinley) Turpaz of Yesh Atid. He said his party believes the Ministry of Education should serve as the central coordinator.
“We all know that when you have too many partners, the child falls between the cracks,” Turpaz said during the September webinar. “The Ministry of Education, which by law encounters these children every single day, must be the case manager for the entire process.”
He said the ministry should coordinate with the welfare and health ministries, the National Insurance Institute and other relevant bodies dealing with mental health from childhood through age 18, while also creating a bridge into academia.
“We are talking about adding hundreds of millions of shekels and genuinely taking a comprehensive view of the issue,” Turpaz said.
Ben-Shitrit’s party would also place the Education Ministry at the center of its approach, but from a different perspective. He proposed changing the first hours of the school day so they are “devoted to the soul.”
Instead of starting immediately with subjects such as mathematics and civics, he said the first or second period of the day should be devoted to emotional well-being.
Let the children release what they are carrying
“Let the children release what they are carrying,” Ben-Shitrit said.
He accused the Education Ministry under the current government of failing to adequately address the problem.
“It has enormous budgets but insufficient activity,” Ben-Shitrit said. “If we take the correct budgets, change the essence of what we are doing, and change the paradigm, we will build healthy resilience and a healthier society.”
His party also supports establishing a national authority to address the issue. It would not necessarily have to operate within the Education Ministry and could instead be an independent body. Two other parties represented at the webinar, Yashar and the Democrats, presented similar ideas.
We need to create some kind of national body capable of assuming responsibility
“We need to create some kind of national body capable of assuming responsibility,” said Yashar candidate Shira Shapira, whose son Aner was murdered on October 7 while attending the Nova music festival. “But it cannot remain in air-conditioned government offices. It has to go into the field and actually be present on the ground.”
Michal Rozin of the Democrats expressed similar sentiments but acknowledged that creating a new national body would be expensive and “take time and a great deal of energy.”
“Perhaps what we actually need is a compact interministerial working staff that pools resources and coordinates all the relevant bodies,” Rozin offered. “There is funding. Many nonprofit organizations today deal with this subject, some doing better work than others. There needs to be supervision, as was already said, over the nonprofit sector and over treatment programs. And we need to synchronize all of these different bodies.”
She said that while it may “sound like the most obvious thing in the world, it does not happen.”
The result, according to MK Michal Miriam Waldiger of the Religious Zionist Party, is that children fall through the cracks.
“Some people who need treatment receive it from multiple places, while others receive nothing at all,” Waldiger said. “To have one body that coordinates the entire event and brings everything together is essential.”
The candidates also emphasized the need to focus on prevention rather than waiting until children reach a crisis point. Turpaz, for example, said that if the system functions properly, the focus should not only be on identifying symptoms or treating crises after they emerge, but on preventing them whenever possible.
“We can solve problems after they happen,” Shapira agreed. “But it is better to try to prevent them and provide people with the necessary tools before problems develop, or at least at their earliest stages … Prevention is perhaps the most important place to begin.”
But even if Israel develops a national strategy, another question remains: Who will actually treat the children?
Today, the staffing standard is approximately one educational psychologist for every 1,000 students in grades 2 through 12, according to ICAR.
“One way to expand the circle of people able to help is to create trained support personnel who can identify people in the early stages, understand who needs to be referred for more professional treatment, and identify those who can receive support within the community,” Shapira suggested. “Expanding the circle of people who can identify problems and provide support is absolutely critical because of the shortage of professional therapists.”
Rozin similarly suggested that education and medical professionals, nursing staff and welfare workers should be trained to recognize trauma, post-trauma and emotional distress, allowing them to identify problems earlier.
But Waldiger said more people could become qualified if the training process were streamlined. Today, becoming a psychologist in Israel, she said, is a “very long and difficult path, perhaps even more so than doctors, with various examinations in the middle. We need to change that entire concept and make it more like medicine. It should be difficult to be accepted, certainly. But once a person is accepted, the path toward qualification should be much more straightforward.”
She also cautioned that as the number of therapists expands, greater regulation will be needed. Waldiger said that today, people without the appropriate training can present themselves as therapists.
“Even before talking about staffing ratios, which are important, we need to regulate this entire issue of who is considered a therapist,” she said. “Then we need to define the different types of therapists.”
Rozin also called for a substantial increase in funding, even after the government increased the annual mental health budget. Last year, the government approved an NIS 451 million boost in funding for mental health services over 2025 and 2026.
But addressing Israel’s mental health crisis, Shapira argued, cannot focus solely on treating trauma. The country should also consider how to help people grow from it.
“I am referring to a psychological concept I learned about recently, PTG, post-traumatic growth,” Shapira said as she concluded her portion of the webinar. “I personally experience it in my own life. I genuinely feel that I take my pain and my personal trauma, from the unbearable loss of Aner… I have tried to channel it into action and into a sense of mission.”
She said thousands of families in Israel have taken their pain and transformed it into nonprofit organizations that benefit Israeli society, social action, volunteering, and countless expressions of mission and meaning.
The pain becomes an engine for growth. We need to think about how to create a national program for post-traumatic growth.
“The pain becomes an engine for growth,” Shapira explained. “We need to think about how to create a national program for post-traumatic growth.”
For Israel’s children, the decisions made now could shape not only how they recover from the trauma of the past three years, but also the resilience of the country they will one day inherit.
Ultimately, Waldiger said, Israel’s ability to fight its enemies depends not only on military strength, but also on the resilience of the people behind it. Soldiers need resilience, she said, including mental resilience.
“It is not only a question of how many guns, weapons, and airplanes we have,” Waldiger noted. “The question is who is sitting there and who is holding the weapon. If we do not have mental resilience, then God forbid, we are heading toward disaster.”
This report is part of Traumatech, a series developed and created by Maayan Hoffman and debuting on The Media Line. The series explores how Israel is building and exporting breakthrough mental health technologies that can transform life at home and bring hope to communities worldwide.
