Eating disorders are among the most lethal psychiatric illnesses, second only to opioid use disorder.
Treatment demands coordinated medical, nutritional, and psychological care. The connection to trauma is undeniable: up to 95% of patients have endured at least one traumatic event.
Yet eating disorders remain absent from Israel’s national trauma protocols. That omission costs lives. If Israel is serious about mental health reform, it must bring eating disorders out of the shadows – into data, into policy, and into the core of trauma care.
Official figures list 10,000 to 15,000 Israelis in treatment, but experts estimate the real number is five to six times higher, between 70,000 and 90,000.
Most available data focus on women aged 16 to 24, overlooking girls under 16, older women, and men. When whole groups vanish from statistics, they vanish from budgets and services too.
Categories such as binge eating disorder, night eating syndrome, and obesity-related disordered eating are often excluded, even though they overlap with clinical eating disorders and require similar care.
The absence of recent epidemiological studies leaves policymakers guessing in the dark about who is sick, who gets treated, and who disappears from the system.
Many never even enter the data. Some fear the stigma; others worry that a diagnosis could threaten military eligibility. The result is an invisible population, untreated, uncounted, and often unseen until crisis. In a country where data drives policy, this blind spot is perilous. We cannot treat what we refuse to measure.
A system under strain: eating disorders in crisis
Israel’s treatment system, while staffed by skilled clinicians, is already stretched to breaking point. The largest inpatient program has only 30 beds. Even the fastest intake center rejects two-thirds of referrals.
Diagnostic bottlenecks slow entry into care. Before October 7, this was a chronic strain. After the war began, it became an emergency. One program director reported a 40% spike in demand almost overnight. Early on, most new patients presented manageable symptoms.
By early 2025, however, cases had grown far more complex: eating disorders compounded by trauma, depression, addiction, single parenthood, and financial stress.
Clinicians now describe a “second generation” of untreated eating disorders: children raised in families where the illness went unrecognized. Many arrive in crisis, malnourished and medically unstable.
Even for those accepted into programs, sustaining treatment is daunting. Recovery requires consistency, therapy sessions, nutrition plans, and family involvement. That is impossible for someone working multiple jobs or caring for children under fire.
Family-Based Treatment (FBT), a gold-standard model empowering families to lead recovery, can be transformative. But it demands time, training, and resources.
Right now, only one private center in Israel provides it consistently. For most families, it is out of reach.
The cracks are widening. Patients who once slipped through the system are now flooding it, sicker and harder to treat. The absence of coordinated data and trauma integration is not a technical glitch; it is a national policy failure. Eating disorders must be explicitly recognized in Israel’s trauma and mental health frameworks.
We need a national registry that tracks who is affected, who receives care, who improves, and who does not. This data should guide real investment: more inpatient beds, expanded day programs, and intensive training for clinicians across regions.
Prevention must begin early through school programs, community outreach, and primary care screening. Families, too, need structured support so evidence-based treatments like FBT can thrive within the public system.
Amir Zendakovich, director of the eating disorder program at Reuth Hospital, compares the current state to a dam:
“We’re seeing the leaks, patients in full crisis. But behind them is a flood of suffering we’re not ready for. If we don’t expand services now, that dam will break.”
The choice for policymakers is stark. Continue sidelining eating disorders as niche, or treat them as the high-impact health crises they are. We already see the cracks; we already know the scale. What is missing is the will to act.
Because when someone recovers from an eating disorder, we do not just save a life; we restore families, rebuild resilience, and strengthen the nation itself. It is time for Israel to act before the dam gives way.
The writer is a co-founder and executive director of ICAR Collective, Israel’s Collective Action for Resilience, and is dedicated to accelerating trauma healing and advancing mental health resilience through coordinated collaboration across Israel’s public health, NGO, academic, and research communities.