As a mother of four, when I heard about yesterday’s school-trip explosion in the north, I thought first about the parents. They had sent their children off for a day with classmates and teachers. Then came the calls no parent ever wants to receive.
A teenager was killed, and over 20 students and teachers were injured when unexploded ordnance detonated during a hike near the Lebanese border. The students came from Ma’alot-Tarshiha, a community that has experienced rocket fire, drone alerts, and direct impacts from the war in the last three years.
And then, because of my work in mental health, I thought about what happened yesterday in the context of everything these children and their families are already carrying.
There will be investigations and questions about how this happened. Those questions deserve answers. But alongside them, we need to ask another question: What does another devastating event mean for children, families and communities who have already lived through years of threat?
Our phones are still buzzing with flydubai memes. Passengers and crew helped save an Israel-bound flight after the co-pilot attacked the captain and tried to crash the plane. Israelis became superheroes: the people you want sitting beside you when everything goes wrong.
While public story is about courage, background holds unbearable loss
But I know of a father and daughter who were traveling together on that plane. They had already lost their son and brother during the war. In WhatsApp groups I belong to, trauma experts were discussing who could help them find the right therapists. While the public story was about extraordinary courage, another conversation was about finding care for a family facing another terrifying experience on top of an unbearable loss.
We can celebrate courage and still leave room for what comes afterward. Surviving does not tell us how someone is sleeping, whether they feel safe boarding another plane, or what the experience means alongside an earlier loss.
And we should be careful about turning extraordinary responses into ordinary expectations. Must Israelis always be Superman? Must children keep adapting? Must bereaved families keep finding reserves of strength?
We tend to organize trauma around events: October 7, a rocket attack, a death, a flight, an explosion. Services, funding, and public attention often follow the same logic. Something happens; an emergency response is mobilized.
But people live through these events in sequence, carrying what came before. The next experience does not arrive on an empty page.
There is also a dimension of trauma that receives less attention than fear: what happens to trust.
“Moral injury” is a term used in mental-health research and clinical practice. It describes the psychological wound that can occur when an experience violates deeply held beliefs or values. The word “moral” refers to what has been wounded, not a judgment that anyone is immoral. It can involve guilt, shame, anger, or a sense of betrayal, and can occur with or without PTSD.
It is not another name for disappointment, or a diagnosis we can assign to people from afar. But it gives us language for questions that may surface after a tragedy.
We accept that life contains risk, while relying on others to help us navigate
I trusted that my child could go on this trip because someone had checked the route, assessed the dangers left by the fighting, and approved it. I trusted that the children knew what not to touch. I trusted the aircraft manufacturer, the airline, and the people and procedures responsible for deciding who could enter the cockpit.
We organize our lives around trust. We accept that life contains risk, while relying on others to help us navigate it. October 7 already shook that belief. An invasion from Gaza, entire communities overrun, so many hostages; all things many of us considered unfathomable.
New tragedies can touch that earlier wound. The question becomes bigger than “Was this trip safe?” or “Can I board another plane?” It becomes: “Can I still trust the things I rely on to live my life?”
Responding to all of this requires room for different needs, different reactions, and different timelines.
Someone may want to talk; someone else may need time. Courage, humor, grief and fear can all have a place. A person who acted heroically may still need help afterward.
A diagnosis should not be the price of admission to compassion.
We can acknowledge a sense of betrayal without prejudging responsibility, and help people rebuild a sense of safety while answers are still emerging.
That flexibility needs to be built into the support system. The injured need care. The bereaved need sustained support. Classmates, siblings, parents, and teachers need opportunities to ask questions and receive clear, age-appropriate information. Some will need practical guidance and support from people they trust. Others will need specialized treatment.
This is what a population-health approach looks like in practice: support across the affected community, with levels of care that adjust as people’s needs change. Neither sending everyone to therapy nor waiting for a diagnosis is enough.
The search for therapists in those WhatsApp groups reminds us how much knowledge and generosity exists here. The task is to turn that capacity into accessible pathways, so finding appropriate help does not depend on knowing the right person.
That means building a system that provides support beyond the first days, makes it easy to find the right level of care, and checks back rather than assuming that silence means recovery. It means funding the coordination and follow-up that rarely make headlines but belong in any serious response.
Admiration for Israeli resilience comes easily. But yesterday’s event is a reminder that we owe these children, families, and communities more than admiration for how much they can endure.
We owe them a lasting commitment to their recovery.
Gila Tolub is a co-founder and executive director of ICAR Collective, Israel’s Collective Action for Resilience, which is dedicated to accelerating trauma healing and advancing mental health resilience through coordinated collaboration across Israel’s public health, NGO, academic, and research communities.
