Disrupted bereavement: Situational and procedural disruptions underlying grief following mass trauma - The case of the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel

This article examines how mass-scale traumatic events hinder normative bereavement through situational and procedural disruptions, using the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel as a focal case. We map how four core components in the grieving sequence - pre-death notification, pre-burial, memorialization and rituals, and mourning, are altered under such extreme conditions. We argue that established grief models and diagnoses like Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) are insufficient, as they focus on individual psychopathology and fail to account for the pathological nature of the situation itself. We propose the framework of “disrupted bereavement” to describe this broader constellation of grief complications, not as a diagnostic entity, but as a lens to examine how disrupted circumstances may impede emotional, relational, and meaning-making processes. This framework offers a basis for identifying high-risk grief and calls for culturally sensitive, trauma-informed clinical and policy responses to support mourners in navigating disrupted loss.