Inside the Hospital Where Israeli Doctors Treat Syrian Patients

Sara Elizabeth Williams

The attack last month by a group of Israel’s Druze minority on wounded Syrians traveling in an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ambulance to a hospital in the Golan Heights has drawn attention to Israel’s practice of offering medical care to Syrian militants. But it’s not just rebels who are being treated.

In nearly two and a half years, around 2,000 Syrians have been admitted to Israeli hospitals. While the vast majority are male — up to 90 percent at Ziv, the hospital closest to the border — there are women, too, and 17 percent of all patients are children.

There are the very old, and the very new: At least 10 Syrian babies have been born at Ziv alone since Syrians began arriving in February 2013.

Word has spread that Syrians can access medical help over the border from people they’ve long believed are the enemy. Medics say more patients, and less urgent cases, are filling the beds of publicly-funded Israeli hospitals. As these patients flow in, questions are being raised about the ethics of filling a hospital’s limited beds with Syrians — and how comfortable Israelis are helping their old enemy so close to home.

Ziv Medical Center in the mountain city of Safed, just west of the Golan Heights, is the first port of call for most patients who come through the border fence near the devastated Syrian city of Quneitra. With 331 beds and seven operating theatres, Ziv is modern, well-equipped, and only 40 minutes from the border in a fast-moving IDF ambulance.

Ziv has been treating Syrians since the night of February 16, 2013, when a convoy of IDF ambulances unloaded seven wounded Syrians in the emergency room. Trauma nurse David Fuchs said he and his colleagues were shocked but quickly adjusted.

“Syria, it’s the head of the devil! Suddenly to get people from over the border and to be saving lives, you need to change a disk in your head,” Fuchs told VICE News. “We had to say, listen, what happened, happened. From this moment we need to put this aside and act with a Christian attitude. I think we did it very nicely.”

Fuchs and his trauma room team were unprepared for the severity and complexity of the injuries. “In Syria there’s no CT scan, no X-ray, just ‘Allahu akbar,'” Fuchs says. “They do some heroic things, the doctors in Syria. I think that if I had a hat…” he said, reaching up to doff an invisible cap.

Ziv’s Syrian patients come with an added challenge for Fuchs and his team: trying to figure out what happened. Two unconscious patients have come in with blood-stained notes pinned to their blankets, but most have entailed pure guesswork.

A bloodstained note pinned to an unconscious patient. (Photo via Ziv Medical Center)

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