Yesterday’s edition of Yedioth Aharonoth carried a powerful opinion piece by Anat Meidan about the work done at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon.  Even as the Qassam missiles fall, hospital staff have been working hard to ensure the recovery of all their patients–Israelis and Palestinians alike.  The full translation is presented below.

Ambassadors of Humanity
By Anat Meidan

Over the course of five months, the doctors and nurses of Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon treated Wania Suleiman, a resident of Jabaliya Refugee Camp in Gaza.  After suffering a serious stroke, she lost consciousness during the 24th week of pregnancy.  Attempts at Azati Hospital to stabilize her condition proved unsuccessful and she was transferred to Barzilai.  At the end of September, after about ten weeks during which doctors fought for the lives of Wania and her fetus, she gave birth to her third son.

Last Wednesday, Suleiman passed away in the hospital’s internal medicine ward as the medical staff fought back tears.  Two days later, a Qassam rocket landed in Ashkelon, shaking the hospital building and raising the level of fear and anxiety of its occupants.  “We knew the Suleiman family on an intimate basis; we were happy when a healthy boy was born and saddened that his mother never got to see him.  When she died, our hearts ached,” said Dr. Yosef Mashil, head of the internal medicine department as he rushed off to care for a Gaza resident, about age 40, brought to Barzilai under artificial respiration.

About 25 Gaza residents are now hospitalized in Ashkelon.  They arrive at Barzilai after coordination between the Hospital Authority and the medical institutions in the Gaza Strip.  This dialogue goes on all the time—even when the Qassams thunder overhead.  No one produces a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to saving lives.  The battle to save lives is the sole determining factor, even as an interminable battle rages outside bent on destroying life.

Outside, war prevails, aimed at sowing hatred and death.  Inside, within the hospital walls, the fight is one for the lives of patients regardless of their national identification.  Were, God forbid, a Qassam rocket to fall on the hospital’s grounds, there would certainly be joy in Gaza over the staggering achievement.  It would not occur to anyone to think of the Gaza residents rehabilitating there.

It seems nightmarish and surrealistic, and some would say that it makes no sense, but the response at Barzilai is the only ethical answer to the surrounding chaos.  This model is the way to build humanistic relations between neighbors, humane and normal within a reality that is crazed, sick, and inhuman.

The small glimmer of hope amid the vast darkness is that the husband and children of Wania Suleiman, who was treated with unending devotion at Barzilai, and the families of the 25 Palestinians hospitalized here, will lower the level of hatred when they return home.  They, who met Israelis in white cloaks working to improve their quality of life, will perhaps be ambassadors of coexistence and of a dialogue of words rather than missiles.  Who knows better than they that this is the only alternative left to us.