Arab children orphaned by Israel’s street violence return to school in mourning

The scene in Ramla where Bahaa Amira was murdered in April 2025

Deiaa Haj Yahia reports in Haaretz on 31 August 2025

One wintry evening in December, 34-year-old Mohammed (not his real name) returned from his job at a construction material plant. He brought his children pizza, took a shower and lay down to rest. During the evening, friends asked him to come outside and sit with them in the yard of his home in central Israel. Shortly after they got together, they heard shouting and then gunfire.

Mohammed’s wife came out and saw her husband lying in a pool of blood. “They told me he would be all right,” she recounted, “but I understood from how he looked that he wouldn’t survive.”  Since that evening, she has been raising their four children – who are 4, 6, 9 and 10 – alone. “We had a beautiful and simple family. We didn’t demand too much from life,” she said. “Since my husband passed away, the light has been extinguished at home.”

Mohammed’s children had planned to attend camp and other activities during the summer, but since his killing, they refuse to leave home.”They just seclude themselves. It’s very hard for me to be alone with them, particularly during vacation, without a framework,” she admitted, adding that they only open up slightly during sessions with Sunflowers, a nonprofit organization for children who have experienced loss. “But they don’t fit in anywhere else.”

Her six-year-old has almost completely lost his self-confidence, she lamented. “I tried to enroll him in a sports camp, but he wasn’t ready for it. He just wanted to stay at home,” she said. During the school year, he was reluctant to go to kindergarten. “Every morning became a battle,” she said, expressing concern that her other children would follow suit and refuse to go to school.

Her eldest child, a girl, has reacted differently. She’s sensitive to any slight – the wrong word or glance affects her for days, he mother recounted. “She doesn’t say anything. She just holds it in,” her mother said, “and then all of a sudden, she decides she doesn’t want to go to school.  She mentions him all the time, always asking about him,” said the mother, referring to Mohammed. “But she’s internalized that he isn’t coming back, and that may be the hardest thing, that a 10-year-old girl knows what irreversible loss is.”  With the start of the school year on Monday, September 1, however, she’s the only one of the four children who has expressed any interest in returning to their regular routine. The other three children appear entirely indifferent, devoid of any sense of joy or curiosity, their mother said.

Mohammed’s family’s story isn’t all that exceptional in Israel’s Arab community. Since the beginning of the year, 160 children have lost a parent to the wave of homicides sweeping the community. According to Sunflowers, an Israeli nonprofit that provides services to Israeli children who have lost a parent, another 36 children in the Arab community lost a parent to the violence over summer vacation. There are even some who have lost both parents.

Daily grief
There have been 207 homicides in Israel since the beginning of the year, 167 of them in the Arab community. They include the case of Bahaa Amira, who set out to go shopping in the central Israeli town of Ramle and was shot and killed along with two other Ramle residents, Bilal Abu Ghanem and Salah Afifi.  Amira wasn’t the target of the killing. He was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, like many other homicide victims from the Arab community.

Amira had three children, who have not been the same since. “They don’t go to kindergarten and don’t even play with the cousins,” said Amira’s brother Ziyad. “They’re always asking, ‘Where’s Daddy? Why did this happen?’ and we have no answers. One of them is starting first grade now and he’s always saying that it’s hard without [his father]. How can a little boy start his life at school when his father is no longer alive?”

The entire family is living in constant fear, Ziyad Amira said. “It’s not over with the loss itself. We adults are also afraid. The children can’t fall asleep. They wake up frightened in the middle of the night. Sometimes they cry for no reason. Sometimes they simply remain silent. They’re not the same children since their father died.”

Children who have lost a parent to a homicide experience a different kind of orphanhood, experts in the field say. Their cases don’t center around the pain of loss itself. Instead, they experience ongoing trauma. Many of the children in the Arab community who have lost parents to the violence were witness to the killing or at least heard the gunshots. Some are afraid of being the next target and retain a sense that it could happen again.

For many of the children, even simple routine is a challenge. Instead of getting up to go to a breakfast table with two parents, they face an empty chair and painful silence. Preparing for a new school year becomes an emotional burden. They may have new supplies and clothes, but they’re missing someone to hold their hand on the way to school.

The little moments that ordinarily pass without notice become a daily reminder of what was violently taken from them.

And then there’s the element of stigma, said Sanaa Azam, an educational counselor and social worker who works with youth at risk. “Sometimes the child is labeled as a child of the underworld even if their father was shot at random,” she explained. “Friends in class steer clear of them and make it more painful not only at the time of the murder but every day after that, and we’re seeing that in school.”

So in addition to grief, there are strong feelings of rejection and shame and sometimes even a desire for revenge, said Dr. Baka Mawassi, Sunflowers’ Arab community director. “These feelings aren’t only a personal wound,” she explained, “but a real societal danger. They maintain the cyclical structure of the violence.”

“With the beginning of the school year, these children are returning to educational settings not as regular children but as people whose world has been destroyed. Instead of beginning the new year with a new backpack and a smile, they’re carrying the heavy load of violent loss and a life cut short,” she said.

“Some of them seek to disappear into the background. Others project uncontrolled anger,” Dr. Mawassi explained. “For teachers, it’s dealing daily with questions that don’t have simple answers. How do you explain to a seven-year-old that their father is never coming back?”

This article is reproduced in its entirety