The Media Line: First Responders Race To Prevent Long-Term Psychological Damage  

First Responders Race To Prevent Long-Term Psychological Damage  

Clinical psychologist Shulamis Pollack says one of the most effective ways to prevent PTSD is to help people organize the event into a clear narrative, highlighting how they used logic to create safety and make difficult decisions  

By Maayan Hoffman / The Media Line  

Even as the United States and Iran are engaged in a tentative truce, and the Islamic regime has, for now, halted its ballistic missile fire toward Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that operations against Hezbollah will continue. As a result, while much of the country is experiencing a temporary sense of calm, residents of northern Israel are still living with regular sirens and constant fear.  

Ori Mogel and his wife, Tom, have been living in Misgav Am for the past 10 years. The kibbutz is the northernmost community in Israel, even farther north than Kiryat Shmona and Metula, and sits just 5 km from the Lebanese border. “Our perimeter fence is literally the border, the border fence,” Mogel told The Media Line.  

Mogel has three children under the age of seven. When the previous war began after October 7, the family was forced to evacuate and eventually relocated to a kibbutz near Kfar Saba in central Israel. They had only just returned home in March 2025. Now, they are once again under threat.  

“On one hand, we are very strong. We’re a strong community, we take care of each other, and we want everyone to come back and be together,” Mogel said. “On the other hand, the way we live here is not normal. I don’t want to use words I shouldn’t, but it’s not normal.”  

Recently, Mogel took his family to the desert just to escape the sounds of war. Even when rockets are not landing in their backyard, the north is filled with the constant noise of conflict.  

“The army is here, Hezbollah is here,” he said. “These are very difficult sounds, especially for children my kids’ age, and even older. You have to take breaks from that.”  

He criticized the Israeli government for not providing sufficient relief and asserted that 70% of northern residents lack adequate access to a protected space of some kind. This statistic, however, was not confirmed by experts. 

“I would expect the state to do everything possible to ensure I have a safe room in my house, especially now, so my children can be safe,” Mogel said. “Officials can come here and see how we live. If you tell me I can stay here with my children, but a cleaning worker or technician is not allowed to come because it’s too dangerous, then something is wrong.”  

The level of trauma among children is already becoming clear, even if its long-term impact is still difficult to measure. A report by the State Comptroller following the October 7 massacre found that around 30% of the country is experiencing symptoms of trauma or even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  

Mogel described how his 6-year-old daughter recently learned to ride her bike without training wheels. She went out for a ride, heard a siren, and instinctively dropped the bike and ran to a safe room. His 4-year-old son can already distinguish between Israeli explosions and those coming from Hezbollah. His youngest, just a year and a half old, runs to the safe room as soon as she hears a siren, without hesitation.  

How will this affect the children in the long term? “They will need treatment,” Mogel said. He lived through the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when he was 13, and needed help himself. “I hope their lives won’t be damaged, but I expect I’ll need to give them the treatment they’ll need … We’ll all probably need treatment.”  

Mogel knows his children will need professional help to heal. Across Israel, experts like Shulamis Pollak are already delivering that help, deploying to rocket sites to regulate nerves before trauma takes root.   

Pollak, a clinical psychologist from Beit Shemesh, works with United Hatzalah’s first responders psychotrauma unit. Their role is to support residents in the immediate aftermath of an attack.  

“We go to an impact site, and we don’t know what we’re going to find, much like medical personnel don’t know what they will find,” Pollak explained. “We’re trained to look for different levels of distress … In all cases, the first thing that we do is get a person’s nervous system regulated, and once they’re regulated, we can help them make well-thought-out decisions, effective decisions, safe decisions.”  

At any impact site, people affected in non-medical ways also need care because they can become vulnerable to harm, she said, recalling one site she arrived at shortly after the war began, where a woman’s house had been hit and was literally crumbling. The family had gotten out, but the woman kept running back inside to gather belongings.  

She was panicking, saying: “I need my head covering. I need my favorite bag. I had a birthday present I got from my mother-in-law, and I want it,” as the house continued to collapse around her.  

Pollak told The Media Line that the mental health role at such moments is to prevent “second-line damage”—injuries from people who, unstabilized and ruled by emotion rather than logic, make dangerous decisions.  

There is also a second level of care for people who are no longer in immediate danger but are unable to organize their thoughts. In another incident, Pollak arrived at an impact site where the homes were still standing, but all the windows had been blown out. In one house, glass covered the floor, and a mother of four young children was trying to sweep it up while her children stood barefoot nearby.  

“The first thing I said to her was, ‘Let’s take a breath. Let’s survey the scene logically,’” Pollak explained. She calmed the woman and encouraged her to leave the house with her children. She called her husband, who later arrived and cleaned up the glass himself. “We sat down after I stabilized her, and I was able to help her figure out the next steps,” Pollak said. “I’m engaging the logic part of her brain, and then I’m allowing her to make a regulated decision when she’s in a much calmer place.”  

After the first attack on Beit Shemesh during Operation Rising Lion, as a result of which nine residents were killed, Pollak and several other psychotrauma responders from her unit held a session that evening for first responders who had worked at the impact site that day, including  United Hatzalah ambulance drivers and volunteer medics who were exposed to the extremely difficult sights, sounds, and experiences of that day.  

Pollak noted that responders are affected not only by the death and destruction at the scene but also by their own decisions in the moment, such as who to prioritize or whether to enter a burning building. She emphasized that processing these experiences immediately is key to preventing long-term trauma.  

United Hatzalah’s psychotrauma unit brings together professionals from diverse backgrounds across the country. They maintain a WhatsApp group to quickly share information about incidents that may require support. Typically, nearby responders arrive first. When an event occurs in a responder’s own community, it is often beneficial for them to attend because they understand the local culture and mindset.  

According to Pollak, one of the most effective ways to prevent PTSD is to help people organize the event into a clear narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, highlighting how they used logic to create safety and make difficult decisions.  

“Then they feel good about those choices, which doesn’t mean that we whitewash things that were hard, but it means we make order out of things,” Pollak said. “One of the greatest ways to prevent PTSD is to have an organized version of what happened, an organized narrative.”  

With around 100 first responders attending the evening workshop in Beit Shemesh, Pollak said the team helped build this narrative while also providing psychological first aid. This included preparing participants for what they might experience in the coming hours and days and helping them recognize when they might need additional support. The team also shared practical tools for self-care, including how to sleep, exercise, eat well, and support physical health, so emotional recovery can follow.  

“The medical field has become more aware of how important people’s emotional needs are for their long-term medical wellness,” Pollak said. “I think that’s an enormous step that United Hatzalah has taken, in parallel with the broader medical field, by providing psychological first aid so people can remain well.”  

Mogel said he understands that he and his family are, in a sense, protecting the country by continuing to live in the line of fire. “We understand the responsibility,” he said, adding that he is willing to bear that burden, even if it means years of trauma therapy. But he hopes that this time the IDF will finish the job rather than sign an early ceasefire and leave the area unsafe.  

“Agreements won’t solve this. They need to finish what they started,” Mogel concluded. In his family’s case, he said, they can only heal when it is safe and quiet.