EIN BOKEK, Israel — A once-vibrant resort along the Dead Sea, Ein Bokek used to host thousands of tourists from all over the world, many of them seeking the famous healing properties of one of the world's saltiest bodies of water. In the past year, a different kind of healing took place there.
The residents of Kibbutz Be'eri, an Israeli community some 70 miles away, suffered heavy losses in the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023. More than 90 Be'eri residents were killed that day, and 30 were taken hostage. The attack killed nearly 1,200 people in Israel, authorities there say, and sparked the war in the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.
Unlike many other Israeli communities displaced and scattered by the violence of Oct. 7, Kibbutz Be'eri's 900 residents were all evacuated to the same hotel in Ein Bokek the day after the Oct. 7 attack. In the months that followed, they worked to maintain their unity and help the kibbutz's children recover from the trauma they went through.
Kibbutz member Alice Shahar, 42, a kindergarten teacher, mother of four young children and coordinator of the kibbutz's kindergartens, was key to that effort.
A few days after her family and the other members of the kibbutz arrived at their hotel, the David Dead Sea Resort, it became clear they'd be staying there for the foreseeable future. Many of their houses had been destroyed, and their kibbutz, near the Gaza Strip, was in danger of rockets.
Shahar and other parents realized they had to act.
"I realized that the kids having no routine will break us as a community," she says. "After a week and a half, we managed to establish seven kindergarten classes."
In addition to these classes, they added what she called a "parents' compound" — a communal space where mothers and fathers could come and watch their kids. "We wanted them to feel safe and make it clear that they don't have to be separated from their children if they don't wish it, and that we are with them and we go through it together," Shahar explains.
As the new school year began this fall, most Kibbutz Be'eri members had left the David hotel, moving to a temporary residential neighborhood nearby, built for them adjacent to another kibbutz. The kids split off into different schools. Most families hope to return someday to Be'eri, when it feels safe to do so — and a couple hundred have returned already.
"Be'eri is a strong community and very united, a community whose goal is to restore the kibbutz," says Shahar, who believes these strong connections are vital to healing. "Our ability to organize and grow is what special about it."
The ways young children played changed after Oct. 7, 2023
Like residents of other kibbutzim near Israel's border with the Gaza Strip, the children of Kibbutz Be'eri were born and grew up in a tense environment. Even those of a young age knew how to behave when they heard a rocket alarm, the result of the times they had to drop everything and run to shelters or hide under their parents.
Shahar says before Oct. 7, 2023, the parents at this kibbutz could easily reassure their children that they were safe. Since then, she says, both children and adults experienced "the loss of innocence." Many saw their homes burned and loved ones being harmed or kidnapped that day, and despite calls for help, there was no immediate Israeli police or military response.
"On Oct. 7, when we were woken up by the alarms, I did not really understand what is happening. We stayed in the shelters for hours before the military rescued us — so I knew it wasn't just a normal rocket launch. But only when I arrived in the Dead Sea and asked a friend what is going on and she told me they [Hamas] took her child, I was starting to understand," Shahar says.
"We can no longer tell them the army is protecting you, we are protecting you, everything is fine, nothing will happen to you," she says.
Parents noticed stark changes in their children's behavior and play after that day.
After Oct. 7, "The conversation became very warlike," Shahar says. "The children talk in terms of terrorists, murderers, fires. I think there is almost no child who doesn't play terrorists and soldiers."
Shahar and the kindergarten team used this as a way to help children process what they had been through.
"We deal with it mainly through play. For example, the teachers noticed that the children were playing [at] putting out fires. In response, we asked them to build us a model of a fire truck so that the children would have a way to cope, to put out the fire as they could not do on the seventh of October. We want to give them back the control they lost after the massacre. It's a very hard thing to do, especially because there are still hostages in Gaza and some things can't get better before they are back."
Thirty Be'eri residents, including Emily Hand, then nine years old, were among the 250 people taken hostage from Israel into Gaza last Oct. 7. The girl was released with 104 other hostages last November as part of temporary ceasefire that included an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.
Dr. Ayelet Felus, a clinical psychologist based in Tel Aviv who volunteered to help the evacuated communities in the first days of the war last year, says that games such as putting out imaginary fires or fighting and winning against Hamas are a healthy way for children to process their traumatic experiences.
"The real difficulty is when things remain only in the child's mind," she says. "When the processing is only internal, we have no validation for what happened and did not happen. Once the child talks about the experience with a friend, for example, he is able to process it in the outside world as well. Role-play games are also a way for the children to deal with distress they cannot control, to find a 'solution' for it."
Felus says she saw children playing a game in which a police officer chases and catches terrorists. "The game is their way of processing the injustice they felt, and it gives a lot of strength and helps them regain control over a situation in which they had non and felt helpless," she says.
This is also why it was important that the parents at the David hotel did not try to present the situation to their children as a vacation or as a positive experience, she says.
"The children understand that they are not on vacation," she says. "The attempt to protect the children from knowing the hard truth — such as telling them that we are on a temporary vacation — is problematic because the child feels the emotional truth of the tension and distress. It is better to say, 'We are evacuated to a safe place for a temporary period because of the war,' or any other wording that suits the child's age. Being honest about the situation gives validation to the child's perception of reality, and equally important, enhances feelings of trust toward the parent, and by that, allowing stress relief."
Surveys show Israeli children's emotional distress has risen since Oct. 7
In a survey last December by Goshen, a nonprofit in Jerusalem focusing on childhood care, 82.4% of parents of children between ages 2 and 12 reported their children's emotional distress had increased since Oct. 7. In a follow-up survey in February, researchers returned to the same parents and found 77.5% of them reporting their children continued to suffer from emotional distress.
In another survey, conducted by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, 43% of parents reported that their children were easily startled by sudden noises more or much more than before the war, while 36% reported that their children had greater difficulty saying "goodbye" and 34% said their children had greater difficulty either falling asleep or staying asleep since the beginning of the war.
"Difficult statistics from the beginning of the war are probably going to be only the beginning of a disastrous picture that only becomes clearer down the road," warns Vered Windman, the executive director of the Israel National Council for the Child, a nonprofit that advocates for children's rights.
In a report earlier this year, the council noted that Israel's National Insurance Institute had identified more than 19,000 children "as either physical or mental victims of terror," including 37% under age 6, between Oct. 7 and Feb. 28.
In addition, "Compared to the comparable months in the previous year, during October-December 2023, there was an increase of 28% in the calls to the [emergency] 118-hotline concerning violence, sexual abuse, and child neglect. During the same period, there was an increase of 37% in calls to the hotline concerning domestic violence against children," the council reported.
Windman says the council wants Israel's government "to put the issue of children and youth as a national top priority," especially when it comes to their mental health "and prepare for the crisis that will come once the war ends… the war exposed the urgent need for stronger social safety nets that were harmed as result of trend of underfunding in recent years. We believe that only a decisive strategic change, especially regarding the mental health of children, can lead to a change that will save many children and also Israel as a society."
Yonatan Amster, director of regulation at the Ministry of Health, said there was a general preparation for the expansion of mental health care in the country, but not specifically for children.
A garden in the desert
Twenty miles south of the David hotel, there is a school named BaMidbar, or "In the Desert." This is where elementary school children from Be'eri and other communities used to come for field trips to study local flora and fauna before the war began last year.
After Oct. 7, 2023, at the campus, a synagogue was turned into a classroom, sleeping quarters were used for therapy and several temporary classrooms made from shipping containers were scattered around.
Noam Erely, the principal of an elementary school in Rishon Lezion, south of Tel Aviv, served as In the Desert's principal since Oct. 25, 2023. Evacuee children began arriving a week later, Erely says.
"At first, there was a thought to bring tents to the [David] hotel area," she says, "but I said that the children should be in open spaces, they need to leave the hotel, and I knew that one of the things that the children need is some peace and quiet, routine, security and an understanding that they are more than just trauma cases."
Amid the school's arid surroundings, one of the most striking islands of color was a vegetable and flower garden. Each child was assigned a part of a flowerbed and chose what to do with it. Some children planted potatoes and later made mashed potatoes out of what grew.
Others planted anemones, like those that grow in southern Israel every year. And some planted wheat because of the song "The Wheat Grows Again," a well-known mourning and remembrance song in Israeli culture, written after Kibbutz Beit Hashita lost 11 men in the 1973 Yom Kippur War between Israel and Arab states.
Sometimes the teachers brought the children to the garden at the end of the school day.
They said it was everyone's favorite place.
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