There is a particular kind of suffering that receives almost no attention in the coverage of armed conflict: the disintegration of the marriage. When a country is at war, suffering happens not only in the trenches under bombardment, but also at the kitchen table, in the bedroom, and in the silence that falls between two spouses. Around the world, in places where war has become the permanent backdrop of ordinary life – from Afghanistan, to Syria, to Ukraine, to Russia, to Israel, to Gaza, to Venezuela and now to Iran – millions of spouses have been fighting on two fronts simultaneously: the war outside their door, and the war inside their marriage.
The story of war contains a sub-story that statistics rarely tell and that headlines almost never capture. During active military operations, families are separated by army service, reserve soldier mobilization, family displacement, and the crushing pressures of survival. With that backdrop, marriages are fractured under pressure. When entire neighbourhoods are destroyed and reduced to rubble, the plight of the divorcing family – parenting, child support or property division – cannot be negotiated or even discussed amid the question of whether any of them will survive the week. War creates prolonged instability, economies are gutted, social infrastructure is shattered and financial survival is unknown. The impact of war is its own kind of violence that plays out in intimate spaces where there are no cameras or reporters. War does not merely kill people. It dismantles the structures that hold families together.
Nowhere has the relationship between armed conflict and family breakdown been documented more carefully in recent years than in Israel, where the family court system has published research tracking divorce trends across a period of extraordinary national crisis. The findings are striking, not because they are surprising, but because they give precise numerical shape to something that those living through war already know in their bones.
In 2020, 10,996 Israeli couples divorced. By 2021, as the COVID period was winding down, that number peaked at 11,534. There was a modest decline in 2022 and 2023, with approximately 10,800 divorces each year. Then, in 2024, as the war launched in the aftermath of October 7 entered its most intense sustained phase, the number climbed again to 11,527 – a 6.7% increase from the previous year. In 2025, as combat operations moderated, the number fell to 11,074. The pattern is not random. It tracks the arc of national emergency with unsettling precision.
What the family court researchers identified is a phenomenon they describe as a “released spring” effect. During the acute phase of a crisis, families tend to postpone major decisions. There is a freeze – not necessarily a reconciliation – but a suspension of the ordinary machinery of separation, driven by the practical impossibility of divorce proceedings during wartime. The emotional logic of not dismantling a family while it is already under siege, describes a survival mechanism never disclosed. The “released spring” effect exemplifies the suspension and storage of divorce. When the intensity of the crisis subsides, the stored pressure finds its outlet, and divorce rates spike.
This helps explain why the numbers rose sharply not at the beginning of the war but in its later stages. Israeli families were not falling apart in October 2023. They were holding on. By 2024, after months of reserve duty, displacement, financial strain, and the grinding psychological toll of prolonged uncertainty, the holding was no longer possible.
The Israeli research paid particular attention to the families of reserve soldiers. Data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics found that approximately 50% of married partners of reserve soldiers reported that their spouse’s service had damaged their relationship. The damage scaled directly with the length of deployment: among partners of soldiers who served up to 50 days, 36% reported harm to their relationship. Among partners of soldiers who served between 200 and 350 days, that number rose to 57%. The more time a soldier spent away, the more likely it became that the marriage would not survive the absence intact.
30% of partners of reserve soldiers reported thoughts of separation in 2024 alone – an increase of 6.7% from the previous year.
These are not statistics about broken people. They are statistics about ordinary families subjected to extraordinary and sustained pressure without adequate support structures to absorb the strain.
The children inside these families were not shielded from the damage. 52% of partners reported a deterioration in their children’s mental well-being during their spouse’s reserve service. Among families where the soldier served between 200 and 250 days, 63% reported a negative change in their children’s emotional state. A generation of Israeli children is growing up absorbing not only the ambient terror of living in a country at war, but the more intimate and specific terror of watching their families come apart under that weight.
When it came to seeking help, 35% of partners turned to professional mental health support. The majority (75%) turned instead to family members, which speaks both to the resourcefulness of extended family networks and to the inadequacy of institutional response. People reach for what is available. What was available, for most of these Israeli families, was not a therapist. It was a mother, a sibling, a neighbour.
Israel’s documented experience is a window into a dynamic that is playing out, largely undocumented, across dozens of conflict zones around the world from Kabul, to Damascus, to Kiev, to Moscow, to Jerusalem, to Gaza City, to Caracas and now to Tehran. Although the specific circumstances vary enormously, the common thread is that in the story of war, the story of family breakdown is rarely told. Millions of men are conscripted, families are separated, children are evacuated to families in other countries and marriages are forced to endure.
The Israeli response to their own data was instructive. They recommended establishing dedicated support frameworks and fast-track mediation mechanisms for families of reserve soldiers. They urged recognition that national crises create delay in divorce proceedings – and that the infrastructure of support must be designed to serve people not only during the acute crisis but in the period that follows it. When the released spring begins to move, the long-deferred reckoning arrives.
Societies that send their members to war, that expose their families to the sustained trauma of armed conflict, that allow economic and political instability to grind down the material and emotional foundations of family life, have an obligation to reckon honestly with the domestic consequences of those choices. The divorce statistics are not a side effect of war. They are part of war’s cost – a cost that is paid not on the battlefield but in the lived experience of ordinary people trying to hold their families together.
Family life does not exist in a bubble insulated from their surrounding geopolitical system. They are their most sensitive component. They register every shock. They absorb every pressure. And when the pressure on the spouses exceeds their capacity to absorb it, they break. But this is a story that goes unreported.
This article was recently published in LexisNexis’ LAW360 at https://www.law360.ca/ca/family/articles/2450518/war-and-divorce-how-armed-conflict-tears-families-apart
Steve Benmor, B.Sc., LL.B., LL.M. (Family Law), C.S., Cert.F.Med., C.Arb., FDRP PC, Acc.D.C., is a full-time Divorce Mediator/Arbitrator and principal lawyer of Benmor Family Law Group, a boutique matrimonial law firm in downtown Toronto. He is a Certified Specialist in Family Law, a Certified Specialist in Parenting Coordination and was admitted as a Fellow to the prestigious International Academy of Family Lawyers. Steve is regularly retained as a Divorce Mediator/Arbitrator and Parenting Coordinator. Steve uses his 30 years of in-depth knowledge of family law, court-room experience and expert problem-solving skills in Divorce Mediation/Arbitration to help spouses reach fair, fast and cooperative divorce settlements without the financial losses, emotional costs and lengthy delays from divorce court.
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