A hospital in Safed has given much-needed
medical treatment to around 550 Syrians – both fighters and children. Judith
Field hears some of their stories…
Thousands of Syrian
refugees have fled the country, including injured fighters and children
Over the past two-and-a-half years, around
2,000 injured Syrian fighters and civilians have crossed the border into Israel
and been admitted to Israeli hospitals. Most are men, but up to 17 percent are
children.
Since the start of the civil war in Syria in
2011, 70 percent of the country’s medical community has been killed or fled and
many healthcare facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Six- and-a-half
million people have been displaced to neighbouring countries where they live in
semi-permanent refugee camps with only basic hospital facilities.
The closest Israeli hospital to the Syrian
border – around 40 minutes away in a fast ambulance – is the Ziv Medical Centre
in Safed, a university 331-bedded hospital owned and funded by the government.
It is the only hospital serving the 250,000 residents of the Upper Galilee and
northern Golan Heights and has treated about 550 Syrians to date.
Learning to walk
(Identities have been hidden for their safety)
“It all started one night in February 2013,”
said Professor Anthony Luder, director of paediatrics. “An IDF ambulance pulled
up at the emergency department and staff were astonished to see inside a group
of injured Syrian fighters.”
Although the Israeli Defence Ministry
described this as an isolated event in which Syrians were being treated as
exceptional cases, more soon arrived and what started as a trickle of patients
has become a steady flow. IDF patrols pick up the wounded at UN transfer points
on the border on the Golan, or in places where the fence is absent or minimal.
Staff at the hospital do not know where the patients come from, nor do they
want to. “We’re doctors and they are our patients. All we want to do is to
treat them,” said Professor Luder.
Patients might be suffering blast or shrapnel
injury, gunshot wounds or a combination of these and other traumas. Treating
such people, often with massive injuries, has its own challenges, not least of
which is trying to work out what has happened.
“Only two have arrived with any sort of
information: blood-stained notes pinned to their blankets. Often diagnosis
involves guesswork,” he explained.
Some patients, while not injured, are still
victims of the breakdown of the Syrian medical system. “A young girl was
admitted with a massive ovarian tumour,” Professor Luder said. “We removed the
tumour but the reality was that, if we sent her back to Syria, she would
receive no treatment. So we kept her at Ziv for three months’ chemotherapy, and
then sent her to a summer camp for Israeli children with cancer.”
Patient with
medical clown (Identities have been hidden for their safety)
It takes time for staff to gain the trust of
the Syrian patients, and there is a language barrier, although the staff are of
multiple ethnicities, matching the make-up of the local community: Jews,
Muslims, Christians, Druze, Circassians and Bedouins. After a while, the
patients begin to talk to the Arab and Arabic-speaking nurses. Many patients
are terrified, having been told that Israelis are devils. One man, for example,
refused to take his sheet off his face for a week.
The new head of the hospital held a meeting at
which it was agreed more or less by all to continue treating Syrians. Staff
felt they had a professional imperative to do so and that it might help build
bridges. It would also develop their skills for use should they need to treat
such severely injured Israeli people.
It has not always been easy for staff to
balance the medical ethical obligation to treat Syrian patients with their
personal feelings. Some thought: “If they can do that to each other, what could
they do to us?” Others, though, felt a connection, saying that it reminded them
of what Jews went through in the Holocaust.
Many of the male patients deny they are
fighters, but it is impossible to know. It would be good to be able to say
that, following treatment, the fighters have a change of heart about Israel.
This, however, is not the case – they might thank staff on leaving, but some
still say they will be back to kill them.
Others, however, have a different attitude.
Luder told me about a girl who was admitted with an amputated right leg and a
shattered left leg. The local people donated a prosthetic limb. “She was
discharged after eight weeks. Her mother expressed gratitude and a wish to meet
again one day, when this troubled region is peaceful,” he recalled. Perhaps the
children – some of whom have been born in Israeli hospitals – will share her
attitude.
In military
ambulance (Syrian patients treated in Israeli field hospitals.
Identities have
been hidden for their safety
Perhaps the seven-year-old boy who had been
told, following 17 unsuccessful operations in Syria, that he would never walk
again, will remember how he regained the use of his leg after one operation at
Ziv.
Word has spread in Syria that people can
access medical help over the border from people they consider the enemy and
Syrians are filling up beds at Ziv. Syrian patients often stay in the hospital
for months, longer than a local person would need, because usually there is no
follow up treatment so rehabilitation must be started in the hospital.
They leave with a discharge letter in English
and all trace of Hebrew and Israel removed from anything they take with them,
often including expensive equipment that would normally be returned to the
hospital.
The treatment of the local community is
sometimes delayed and, naturally, people grumble. But they have also responded
with generosity. Individuals and businesses have donated money and goods, for
example clothes, toiletries, toys and reading material. Each child has a tablet
computer to use while in hospital.
Treating the Syrians has cost the hospital
$33million (£21m) to date. Although there is no clear answer as to where the
funding will come from, Luder considers healthcare a humanitarian imperative.
“Medicine has no borders. It can serve as a bridge between people. We will
continue to provide life-saving treatment to the Syrian casualties for as long
as it is needed.”
