The entrance hall to Galilee Medical Center in northern Israel is mostly empty and quiet. The roar of warplanes and intermittent fireworks replaced the sounds of doctors, nurses and patients at this major hospital closest to the Lebanese border.
Almost all of the hospital’s staff and patients went to the underground shelter.
Today, getting to the hospital’s nerve center involves passing through 15-foot-high concrete barriers and multiple blast doors, then descending several floors into the labyrinthine underground complex.
That’s where thousands of patients and hospital staff have gone over the past six months as strikes have intensified between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, just six miles away. miles north.
The undercover operation at the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya is one of the most striking examples of how life in northern Israel has been turned upside down since Hezbollah began carrying out near-daily attacks. against the Israeli army in October in solidarity with Hamas, which is backed by Iran. led an attack on southern Israel that month.
The cross-border fire has killed tens of thousands of people Israelis evacuated towns and villages and schools, forcing factories and businesses to close. On the Lebanese side of the border, Tens of thousands of others have left their homes.
The hospital has been preparing for such a situation for years, given its proximity to one of the region’s most volatile borders.
“We knew this moment was coming, but we didn’t know when,” Dr. Masad Barhoum, the hospital’s general manager, said in an interview last week.
Hours after the Hamas-led attack on October 7, Galilee Medical Center staff became concerned that Hezbollah could carry out a similar attack. Even before the government issued the evacuation order, hospital executives had decided to relocate much of the sprawling complex to an underground spare annex. They reduced the capacity of the 775-bed hospital to 30% in case of a sudden need to admit a new wave of trauma patients.
“Our mission is to protect the people here,” Dr. Barhoum said. “This is something I’ve been preparing for all my life.”
The hospital’s towering internal medicine ward was now empty, its spacious neon-lit hallways shrouded in silence. In the underground ward’s current location, the hum of hospital machinery mixes with the beeping of golf carts carrying supplies through narrow tunnels leading into the hospital parking lot, providing some sunlight. only heaven.
Patients lie in beds separated by portable curtain rails in a maze of hallways. Visitors sit on plastic chairs in makeshift waiting rooms because the space is too crowded for people to visit patients. Pipes and wires running across the ceiling give the space the feel of a machine room.
In the neonatal intensive care unit, new parents wearing protective gowns huddled to bottle-feed their babies in a dimly lit room. Doctors performed surgery on another tiny patient a few meters away.
The neonatal unit was the first to move below ground on October 7, said Dr. Vered Fleisher Sheffer, director of the unit.
“Even though everyone feels safer here, it is challenging because we are human and now we have to be underground,” she said.
Her unit also went underground in 2006, during Israel’s last all-out war with Hezbollah: Dr. Fleisher Sheffer recalls going to the hospital along barren roads as air raid sirens sounded . One day, a rocket hit the ophthalmology department but the patients were transferred, hospital officials said.
That war lasted just over a month, and the threat from Hezbollah waned in the years that followed. October 7 changed that.
The day before New York Times journalists visited the hospital, a Hezbollah attack hit a nearby Bedouin village, injuring 17 soldiers and two civilians. The injured were taken to the hospital’s ICU, where one of the soldiers died on Sunday.
“These are our neighbors,” Dr. Fleisher Sheffer said, referring to Hezbollah fighters. “It doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere, and neither are we.”
