Oct. 7 “Forever”: An Epigenetic Disaster

Oct. 7, 2023 was very bad news for Israel. Over the past few decades, psychologists around the world have come to a greater understanding of the traumatic mental effects of war on combatants and victims. Unfortunately, the phenomenon doesn’t end with these two groups or only with psychological issues. That’s because of “epigenetics.”

Until the mid-20th century, it was believed that the genes you were born with basically determined who you were and how you would behave i.e., your character, height etc. However, more recent scientific research – in biology, psychology, genetics, medicine – has begun to understand that an individual’s environment could also affect the person, even at the most basic level by changing how our genes were “expressed.”

The process is intriguing: geneticists have known for a long time that our long strands of genes had a lot of “junk” that didn’t seem to have any function. However, it now known that these are dormant until something “wakes them up” – and at that point the blend of genes “working” on us is different than the ones functioning when we were born, for better or for worse (depending on the environmental stimulus).

One of the main questions emerging from this new genetic understanding is whether the “new combination” of gene expression is carried down to the next generation. The answer, unfortunately, is now clear: a resounding yes.

When can this happen? Not so much after a person is born (more in a moment about that “not so much” i.e., sometimes), but rather during pregnancy. Simply put, if a very pregnant woman undergoes severe trauma (physical or psychological), the chances are high that her offspring will carry that trauma through their own lives as well – and even the eventual grandchild will suffer!! Why would this be so? Because the fetus inside such a mother is already developing germ cells (the ones involved in conceiving their own future child), ergo the third generation is impacted as well.

The first indication of this was the Dutch famine generation. When the Nazis in 1944 conquered Holland during WW2, they basically starved the population. We now have strong evidence that these women’s children suffered throughout their lives from higher levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol as well as higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and even schizophrenia – altogether leading to a 10% higher death rate (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.html).

Traumatic epigenetic changes, it turns out, can even manifest themselves down the male line. A remarkable recent study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10593129/) found that “male line grandsons descended from grandfathers who experienced a harsh captivity [during America’s 19th century Civil War] faced a 22–28% greater risk of dying every year after age 45 relative to grandsons descended from non-POWs.”
And now the newest and best-control study has emerged – from the Syrian civil war, of all places (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-02-epigenetic-echoes-violence-genetic-future.html). Their conclusion: “The grandchildren of women who were pregnant during the [1982 Hama Syrian] siege – grandchildren who never experienced such violence themselves – nonetheless bear marks of it in their genomes… the genetic transmission of stress across generations… accelerated epigenetic aging, a type of biological aging that may be associated with susceptibility to age-related diseases.”

The relevance to Oct. 7 is palpable. Israel’s medical and psychological establishment has done yeoman’s work dealing with the trauma of the Hamas barbarities – with soldiers and civilians alike. However, there’s another group that will need serious medical and psychological attention in the coming decades: children born of parents suffering trauma in the Oct. 7 events, and possibly also those children born before Oct. 7, who had to leave their homes with their families for months on end, living (“surviving” would be a more appropriate term) in hotel rooms and other cramped, temporary abodes. In short, epigenetic harm also works on people of any age, albeit more strongly among the young who are developing faster.

This will be an added social and economic burden for Israel for decades to come. Indeed, a recent study estimates that “the economic burden of PTSD on Israel could reach around 197 billion shekels ($53.2 billion) over the next five years” (https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/mind-and-spirit/article-812999). However, this doesn’t take into account the much longer-term impact of “epigenetically altered children” as we move well into the future.

Is there are any good news here? Not much, but it bears noting that such intergenerational trauma is a matter of predisposition and is not an “inevitable,” predetermined outcome. This might be the “luck of the draw” or a function of the specific type of trauma – scientists are still trying to ferret out the relevant factors. Moreover, with the right treatment – psychological and/or biological – we also know that sometimes epigenetic harm can be reversed. In any case, it is an issue that Israeli policymakers would do well not to try and sweep under the rug, due to budgetary cost or ignorance. The price for the economy in lost productivity, not to mention pure human suffering, is too great to be ignored.

Everyone agrees that “war is hell”. Until now, that banal aphorism related exclusively to soldiers and civilians living through the infernal environment of the war itself. Very unfortunately, we now have to widen the scope of that hell to future generations, not merely in the brain’s memory of the war but deep within the cells of our very body’s being – our genes and their enveloping epigenetic material.

Postscript: For a highly detailed and somewhat scientifically technical (but still readable) explanation of the “epigenetic trauma” phenomenon, including studies on Holocaust survivor children, see: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-parents-rsquo-trauma-leaves-biological-traces-in-children/
Next week, I’ll offer a few prescriptions for ameliorating the PTSD problem among Israel’s soldiers and civilians alike.