As Iranian missiles rain down, hospitals scramble to raise funds for underground shelters |
Last week, while medical staff at Hillel-Yaffe Hospital in Hadera were performing a cardiac catheterization in one of the hospital’s three protected operating rooms, a siren went off signaling an incoming Iranian ballistic missile attack.
The missile was intercepted, and the surgery continued successfully. Afterward, the staff wheeled the patient to a different building with a protected recovery area.
On Wednesday, an Iranian missile landed near the Hadera power station, just under a mile from the hospital. The Israel Electric Corporation reported no damage to infrastructure.
“We’re trying to provide excellent medical care without proper security,” Prof. Mickey Dudkiewicz, director general of the hospital, told The Times of Israel via video call before the strike.
Since the conflict with both Iran and Hezbollah began, the hospital — which is located midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa and serves 650,000 people — has been forced to evacuate an entire inpatient building. It has relocated patients to other hospitals, which Dudkiewicz said, “worries us, because what if a rocket hits the ambulance?”
The emergency department and pediatric emergency department now operate in a basement that is not suited for full medical care.
“We have to maintain our ability to treat people, but lives are at risk,” Dudkiewicz said.
The predicament at Hillel-Yaffe reflects the wartime crisis facing medical centers around the country.
With creativity and improvisation, hospitals and other facilities are converting underground parking lots, storage areas, and unused spaces into shelters to protect their patients and staff during the ongoing war with Iran and Hezbollah, which began with joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian regime targets on February 28. However, increasingly, medical centers are finding they don’t have enough funds to keep their patients safe and are being forced to turn to private donors to pick up the slack.
Official Israel is well aware of the scope of the deficit: In a report published in January, State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman found that 56% of inpatient beds and 41% of operating rooms in the country’s hospitals lack standard protective infrastructure.
The situation is even more serious in psychiatric hospitals, where approximately 75% of inpatient beds are unprotected. About 63% of beds in geriatric hospitals lack standard protection.
The comptroller’s report also found that in medical centers near the borders in the north and south,........