Israel’s neglected mental health system struggles to help October 7 survivors

Published: 21 November 2023

Last updated: 5 March 2024

Some 100,000 people have been exposed to traumatic incidents since the outbreak of the war and the system is unable to deal with it.

The Israeli Health Ministry’s mental healthcare services are failing at providing aid to all those scarred by the war, chiefly the victims of the Hamas mass attack on October 7.

At a hearing held by the Knesset Health Committee on the ministry’s nationwide plan for mental resilience, Daniel Raz, head of forced hospitalisation and personal status matters for the Justice Ministry’s legal aid department, said the state was compelled to forcibly institutionalise victims who did not receive timely mental care.

The hearing also revealed that even 39 days since October 7, there are still many victims from that day who have not received any mental-health aid response from the state, and the state does not have comprehensive, accessible information on all the citizens who do or do not receive the aid.

This brought up the severe shortage in mental aid professionals, including psychologists, social workers, and therapists. According to data presented at the hearing by Health Ministry director-general Moshe Bar Siman-Tov, some 100,000 people have been exposed to potentially traumatic incidents since the outbreak of the war, and some 200,000 have been evacuated from their homes.

All this comes on top of the great deficiencies in the Health Ministry’s mental healthcare system even before the war, following long years of under-budgeting and neglect by governments. By October 7 it was on the verge of collapse, still trying to recover from the widespread damage to people’s mental health during the COVID-19 period and during the raging societal divisions during the government’s campaign for a judicial coup.

Photo: Residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, in southern Israel, weep in the ruins of a home destroyed on October 7 (Maya Alleruzzo/AP)