The “Quiet” Trauma that Lingers in Israel
President Herzog and his wife visit with first responders in Sderot on October 11, 2023.
Dina Kraft — December 8, 2025
Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.
Over coffee recently, the mother of three young adult sons tells me that her youngest son, who spent a year fighting in Gaza, had memorial ceremonies to attend on the same day for four different friends killed during the war.
It was impossible to attend all of them, so instead he went to the gatherings for two of them being held at Jerusalem's Mt. Herzl cemetery. One was a close friend he grew up with in the scouts movement. The second was also a dear friend from the same combat unit. The two had sat side-by-side in the car on October 7.
The mother, a psychologist named Noorit Felsenthal Berger, decided to accompany her son to Mt. Herzl, the national cemetery. She was taken aback at the sight of hundreds of new graves on its sloping hills, and – crowded in between them – crowds of young people who had come to grieve anew and remember their fallen friends.
I first met Noorit when I commissioned her, in my capacity at the time as opinion editor of Haaretz English, to write an essay in the spring of 2024 about the experience of being a mother of a combat soldier who thought the war should end.
In a new op-ed in Haaretz published last week, she writes about what she calls the silent trauma that she – and so many other Israelis – are enduring even now, after the war is over. (The war is “sort of” over, as she puts it; her middle son is back on reserve duty for three months now – this time along the Israeli border with Syria.)
She writes of the current situation, “Living in the State of Israel, which is deteriorating day by day from democracy to dictatorship, is a life in which we are condemned to raise children with a government that wants eternal war, against our will.”
In Israel now, fears are mounting that full-scale war could re-erupt. The initial euphoria is fading around the cease-fire that brought Israel’s remaining living hostages home and all-but-one of its deceased back for burial. Sporadic fighting continues in Gaza and Lebanon as well as Syria, and there is no clear path forward for disarming Hamas,.
Years ago, I attended a workshop in the United States with fellow journalists about best practices for covering violence and trauma. The expert leading our group declared a sentence that has always stayed with me: “The most difficult kind of trauma is ongoing trauma.” For me, it was a watershed insight and reflected what I had observed covering the seemingly never-ending cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
Healing and true rebuilding can follow when there is a clear end to an event that causes such harm, I was told. But this is not the case for Israelis today, even more so after the unprecedented trauma of the October 7 attacks, let alone for the Palestinians living in tents in a flattened Gaza, now divided between Israel and Hamas rule, or the West Bank, where settler violence runs unchecked.
The trauma fallout in Israel is reaching crisis levels and across populations. Israel’s state comptroller reported that three million Israeli adults appear to be suffering from PTSD, depression, or anxiety, and that about 40 percent of the public may need long-term mental health care. His report, issued last year, also criticized the state mental health system for long wait times for treatment.
Combat soldiers have been in the streets protesting an army medical system slow to diagnose those with PTSD, even as they suffer its effects. There has been a rash of suicides among young men who served as combat soldiers during the war, including two reportedly in the past week.
According to IDF figures, seven active duty soldiers died by suicide in 2023 following October 7. Twenty-four such suicides followed in 2024, and at least 20 more since the beginning of 2025. This is almost double the number of suicides among active duty soldiers in previous years.
Haaretz reports that at least 15 soldiers, no longer on active duty, have taken their own lives since the war began because of mental health problems incurred during their service.
There is also the problem of the hierarchy of trauma – some of those suffering feel like they don’t have a legitimate “right” to feel traumatized if they were not directly impacted by the massacres and mass hostage taking of October 7, mental health experts say.
Udi Kagan, a well-known Israeli comedian, who himself has combat-related PTSD from a previous war, gave voice to the collective and individual sense of what he calls “invisible” trauma in the country in August when he said in a stand-up routine that went viral, “There is no household in Israel without this thing… this thing that grows in darkness, in shame, in silence.”
In a Facebook post Friday, Nadav Raz, an Israeli reservist and Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner who posts about his own journey with PTSD, described how easily the unseen wounds can be triggered. Reflecting on the recent death by suicide of a soldier he had met briefly, he writes he is reminded “how many people around us walk around with a crushed soul. Not every injury can be seen by the eye. You don't have to be amputated to bear a deep injury.”
He continues, “I am not writing this to elicit sympathy or to ask for help. I write this because we need to see each other. Please know that post-trauma is not a story from the past – it is a living reality. It’s a smell, a sound, a memory that appears without invitation. It’s a remote boom that brings you back to a battlefield you never really left. We need to be aware, to ask, to get closer, to relate. Because sometimes a person looks strong on the outside, and on the inside, he's falling apart. And if we don't see what is happening, we'll lose more people.”
Dina Kraft is a journalist, podcaster and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller, My Friend Anne Frank, together with Hannah Pick-Goslar. She lives in Tel Aviv where she's the Israel Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and a creator of the podcast Groundwork, about activists working in Israel and Palestine. She was formerly the opinion editor of Haaretz English.
Photo by Haim Zach / Government Press Office of Israel, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
