Children of Sderot

I am worried for the future of the children of Sderot (and Ofakim and the entire Otef)

For the past two months I have been trying to assist families in Sderot to apply for continued disability for their children with the Social Security Administration (“Bituah Leumi”). The work has been brutal. Families are required to acquire professional documentation which is simply not available under impossible time pressure. And this in order  document PTSD in children a mere year after the savage invasion of Sderot. Did someone think that the children would all be fine after a year? Is there any professional literature to suggest this? Couldn’t our erstwhile decision makers have granted another year?

Aside from this completely superfluous and harmful institutional pressure, I am worried by what I have been seeing. 

The children are wound up like taught springs. They cannot concentrate in school, and the schools have not been supplied with adequate personnel to cope with a classroom full of taught springs. They cannot sleep at night. They barely fall asleep only to awaken to the incessant rumblings of war in nearby Gaza. They rush to their parents’ beds, exhausting their already extremely tense parents. They cannot bear to close the bathroom door even when showering. They do not go out of their homes alone, many do not step onto their own porches. At every sound of war they run to the Safe room. Most sleep in safe rooms or with their parents. They fight incessantly with their equally wound up siblings. They imagine terrorist invasion constantly. And many seem just worn out, their bright eyes dimmed, just barely getting through each day.

There are no adequate comprehensive plans to relieve the suffering of these children and their families. The “Hosen” programs are overwhelmed and they are equipped to treat the previous level of trauma, not the massive trauma of October 7th, 2023. There are no plans that anyone knows of to create the kinds of services these children need. Even some relief with CBD oil is barely available as our government continues to disrupt supplies and fails to regulate sales despite CBD becoming legal -finally – nearly two years ago. 

These children and their families are at risk for distorted lines of development, as I pointed out more than a decade ago and recently published again. A child of four will enter school in two years unable to concentrate or learn. A child of eight will celebrate a bar mitzvah in five years still wetting the bed and fearing to just go out and play. A ten year old will be unable to complete “bagrut” exams and may be unable to serve in the army. A fourteen year old girl may find it impossible to marry in ten years because intimacy frightens her. Siblings will be struggling with each other and unable to feel warmth and support. There are very scarce resources for family healing together.

It is not difficult to imagine what is needed – a central comprehensive treatment center in the OTEF region that provides all the modalities that could be helpful to children and families. It seems at this juncture impossible to imagine how such a center could come about – certainly not thanks to our tottering preoccupied political structures.