Posted on August 1, 2025
“We’re living through a trauma that just won’t end—and it affects everyone.”
I’m Oded Mazal, Amitei Bronfman 2011. I grew up in a religious family in Jerusalem; today I live in Tel Aviv with my husband, Amitai. I’m a social worker at Ichilov Hospital, working in both pediatric hemato-oncology and the newly opened LGBTQ+ clinic. I recently completed a master’s degree in clinical social work, focusing on trauma treatment, exploring the intergenerational transmission of body perceptions following trauma.
A hospital is a place that feels everything. It’s like a living body that reacts to every external event. When the war with Iran began, we went into emergency mode: within eight hours, anyone who didn’t require acute care was discharged, and the entire hospital moved underground.
At Ichilov, there’s a four-level underground parking garage. It’s used daily for parking, but it’s designed to transform into an emergency hospital, with pop-up partitions to separate departments and everything. It’s a wild setup. But at the end of the day, it’s still a parking garage, and the conditions are tough.
In the hospital, each social worker has their own department and routine, but we’re always on high alert. There are the “usual” emergencies—the late-night calls about cases like sexual assault, domestic violence, child neglect. And then there are the challenges of war.
At the height of the fighting, helicopters were landing here with wounded soldiers. Some of my colleagues accompanied released hostages and their families. When a missile strike hits, we—the social workers—have just 15 minutes to set up a phone information center to help people locate their family members, and then head to the ER to meet them. Recently, during the Iranian attacks, we faced mass casualty events where we couldn’t discharge people and send them home because they no longer had a home to return to.
And in the midst of all this, there’s a strong sense of dissonance. When the war began, there were two sweet kids from Gaza in my ward. They were stuck here while receiving treatment, and it was clear they couldn’t be sent back, especially since they needed regular medical follow-up. And now, during the war with Iran, one of the missiles that hit Bat Yam killed a girl who had been treated here. She had come from Ukraine specifically for medical care—and was killed.
It’s a lot of dissonance. And fear. This feeling that there are no truly safe spaces. During those two weeks of war with Iran, while the Home Front Command instructed everyone to stay home near a shelter, I continued working as usual. I had to drive, under pressure, on open roads, hoping a missile wouldn’t fall on me. You could feel the fear here. You feel everything here.
The return to routine was also surreal. For two weeks, we were underground in emergency mode, and then all of a sudden, everything snapped back into place, and we just carried on as usual. It’s this kind of reality where we’re constantly called to return to routine—but the transitions are always so abrupt. You can see it in people: it takes a moment to process, and can be overwhelming.
All of a sudden, the whole event with Iran was over. The existential threat to our lives had passed, so we were supposed to go back to normal. But that “normal” is actually a routine of war. People are dying in Gaza, soldiers are being killed, there are still hostages—but it all feels more distant now. It still breaks my heart, but it’s no longer part of my daily life.
Ichilov is right on Hostages Square, and every day I pass the yellow ribbons, the photos of the hostages, the families and volunteers sitting in the tents or protesting in the square. So it’s present, it’s there, but—and it hurts to say this—we’ve gotten used to it.
You can’t really treat trauma while the traumatic event is still ongoing. Research also shows that prolonged exposure like this increases the risk of developing psychological symptoms later on. We’re living through a trauma that just won’t end—and it affects everyone.
There’s also something unique about what happened on October 7. The clinical definition of trauma exposure refers, broadly, to four categories: direct experience, witnessing the event, learning it happened to someone close, or repeated/ extreme exposure among professionals. But on October 7, with the horrific content shared on Telegram, the scale of the shock, and the overwhelming sense of threat—we were all, in a way, witnesses to something truly massive and terrible. People felt it in their bones. It was deeply traumatic, even for those who weren’t physically close.
Then there’s the issue of what we call “institutional betrayal.” There’s a well-known video from the 2014 Gaza war, where a soldier, after a harrowing experience, says: “The state didn’t protect me. You sent me to defend, but you didn’t defend me. And you didn’t help me when I needed it.” I think many people today feel the same way about this government and the current reality, as if we don’t have a “mother and father” watching over us. As citizens, we feel there’s a kind of contract between us and the state, and that contract was broken. And when your life is under threat and you no longer believe someone will protect you, or you don’t trust the motives of those making the decisions—it’s deeply rattling.
So in a sense, you could say we’re a nation in trauma.
At the same time, it’s important to distinguish between trauma and post-trauma. The struggle after trauma is completely understandable. It’s the most normal response to an abnormal reality. But most people who experience trauma don’t go on to develop PTSD. Of course, I’m not referring here to the hostages, survivors, and others who went through far more extreme psychological experiences. I’m talking about the broader public and the fact that, as a people, we have extraordinary resilience and natural capacity for healing. A lot of people panic and say, “Now we’re all going to have PTSD,” but I don’t think that’s the case. We see it here every day: there’s a catastrophe, and then we recover. We get back on our feet.
My research (supervised by Dr. Noga Tsur at Tel Aviv University) focused on the intergenerational transmission of trauma through bodily perceptions. We often observe how a parent’s trauma is passed to their child through the physical expressions of their relationship. Specifically, I examined the connection between post-trauma and aggressive behavior, and how bodily expressions of empathy help explain this link. Research shows that people with more post-traumatic symptoms also tend to show higher levels of aggression. Empathy, on the other hand, is generally seen as positive and non-aggressive. So my hypothesis was that trauma might impair one’s empathy, which in turn would lead to aggressive behavior. But that’s not what I found.
My study showed that people with more post-traumatic symptoms actually have higher levels of empathy—and they’re still more aggressive. In other words, the ability to be empathetic toward someone—to truly see them and be attuned to them—doesn’t necessarily lead to positive outcomes. Sometimes, our sensitivity threshold toward others is too high. That heightened sensitivity can be overwhelming and trigger responses that aren’t helpful, either to ourselves or to the other person.
The ability to sense another person’s experience, their pain and fear, can actually be a disadvantage. For example, a mother caring for her crying child in the bomb shelter, while she herself is overwhelmed and stressed, might end up yelling at the child instead of comforting him. She may deeply feel and understand the child’s pain, but have no capacity left to be there for them because she’s already full to the brim. This illustrates how we’re seeing the effects of trauma on the body and how it impacts the entire family. Many studies directly link trauma to physical illnesses—chronic diseases, heart conditions, pain, and more—but it also manifests as anxiety, irritability, sleep difficulties, migraines. Parents aren’t just facing their own mental and physical challenges—they’re suddenly stuck at home for two weeks with the kids, everything shut down, constantly going in and out of the safe room, all feeling each other’s stress.
Judith Herman wrote a book called Trauma and Recovery, where she discusses the dialectic of trauma—how symptoms can be, on one hand, intrusive, intense, and overwhelming (like flashbacks and hyperarousal), and on the other, expressed through dissociation and disconnection. This dialectic (or fundamental tension) constantly moves between these states. Sometimes, dissociation and disconnection protect us. There are moments when we must disconnect from our emotions or from others to keep ourselves safe because we’re unable to cope. But other times, this detachment works against us, leaving us so disconnected that we struggle to maintain relationships with a spouse or family.
It’s too early to talk about intergenerational trauma in the context of this war, since we’re still in it, parents and children together. But I’m sure that once we’ve gained some perspective, there will be much to say about the story of trauma, the body, and family relationships. I imagine this is something we’ll see unfold in future generations.
I always thought I’d live in Israel. It was clear to me that this is my home, my language, and where my family is, and I had no reason to look anywhere else. But something has changed, and I find myself asking: Wait a minute, why are we here? Is it worth it? Is this a place where I want to raise children? Both from a security perspective and from a political one. My instinct is to disconnect, to be practical. But in the end, we’re living through threats, fear, and stress. On one hand, we’ve gotten used to it; on the other, it’s not something you can get used to.
And yet, I’m very much here. There’s something about being in a hospital during wartime, with the dedicated staff and the crowds who showed up after October 7 to donate blood… It feels like we’re all paying a price, but it has meaning.
