INTRODUCTION
The recent terror attacks against the U.S. on September 11, 2001 have profoundly affected the lives of Americans as well as millions around the western world, drawing unprecedented attention to the phenomenon of international terrorism.
Professionally, they have further accelerated the already growing interest in the study of trauma survivors and the pursuit of effective early interventions in the aftermath of traumatic events.
While these hideous terror attacks have sharply awakened public awareness regarding the danger of terrorism, we in Israel, unfortunately, have been too familiar with this phenomenon since (and perhaps even before) the inception of the State of Israel. To illustrate the magnitude of the Israeli public’s exposure to terrorism, according to the official Israeli Defense Force’s web site (
www.idf.il) between September, 2000 and February 2003, 16, 419 terror attacks (including suicide bombing, car-bombs, mortar-bombings, shootings and lynching) were documented, 655 of them where within the “green-line.” In terms of Israeli casualties, * 506 civilians were killed and 3,595 were injured in the last two and a half years. To grasp the significant toll on the Israeli society, translated proportionally to the size of the American population, the number of those killed would have been the equivalent of 23,000 Americans and the number of those injured would have been the equivalent of 163,000. Indeed, this unprecedented ongoing exposure to terror attacks was reflected in a recent study (Bleich, Solomon & Gelkof, personal communication, January, 2003) indicating that 44% of Israelis were either directly involved (16%) or knew of a relative or a friend who were involved in a terror attack.
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