Iran hit an Israeli hospital on Thursday – where is the global outrage?
The doors to the emergency room were blown off; panels blown off walls lay scatted all over the floor; the exit sign to the pediatric intensive care unit hung askew. I woke up yesterday to devastating photos of Soroka Hospital, one of the five largest hospitals in Israel. It had taken a direct hit from one of Iran’s death seeking missiles. As the only Level 1 trauma center in southern Israel, just 22 miles from Gaza, Soroka serves on the frontlines providing critical care to all those in need. I am the CEO of the American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, and the travesty and the depravity of this attack hit me particularly hard.
Over these past few days, I’ve been in constant touch with my colleagues overseas. Patients have undergone difficult non-elective surgeries only to be wheeled on their stretchers to improvised bunkers with dozens of other patients. Mothers who just delivered newborns are being sent home after 12 hours instead of the traditional 48 hours, for their safety. Parents caring for babies desperately in need of the NICU have had to flee when sirens are sounded. Staff and physicians are relocating thousands of patients to make sure they are protected, while also trying to keep the spirits of colleagues strong and unbroken. Those who need elective surgeries have been forced to reschedule, while patients in critical condition have been relocated to safer floors.
Sadly, Israel’s hospitals are operating under the most extreme and dire of circumstances. Yet again. They have stood as Israel’s backbone and refuge through every existential threat to the country’s existence even before Israel’s founding in 1948. Doctors, nurses, auxiliary staff members and visionary administrators have shown up for work through the most impossible days. They have been there for terror victims, injured soldiers and wounded civilians to offer critical care.
As a professional supporting one of Israel’s leading hospitals for the past 24 years, I am shocked by the irony that Israel has been blasted by the media for more than 600 days for targeting Gazan hospitals, even when it has been widely proven that these hospitals have acted as havens for terrorist operations. The world has shouted in outrage about Gazan hospitals as Israel worked to eradicate the evil beneath them. So where are all the journalists and broadcasters now, when the walls of a hospital in Israel have crumbled because of ballistic missiles? That hospital is not hiding terrorists or weapon caches. Where is the world’s outrage? Who is calling Iran to task for their intentional targeting of Israeli civilians, children, and babies?
The relative silence over the bombing of Soroka Hospital demonstrates, as little else can, that calling out Israel for bombing hospitals has little to do with global compassion. Political outcries were never an expression of justice for the vulnerable, because one thing my work has taught me is that medical suffering is politically neutral. It affects the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak. Medical care makes no distinctions between the left and the right. That is why Shaare Zedek, and every Israeli hospital, treats Palestinian terrorists in their ERs, just as they treat any Israeli citizen. We even save the lives of those who take lives. That is what medical care looks like in a democracy.
In these dark days, it is not hard to find the evil in the world. But if you want to catch a glimpse of the light, just watch how colleagues from hospitals around the country have rushed to Soroka’s support and how friends of the hospital across the world have raced to provide for the hospital’s sudden financial needs. Israeli commitment to the sanctity of life will always be prioritized over those who seek to desecrate it.
We at Shaare Zedek stand with Soroka Hospital today, and we stand with the entire State of Israel as it takes on the heavy burden of fighting the greatest nuclear threat to our generation. Hospitals need to stay safe spaces, free from harboring terror and free from missile shrapnel. So I ask again, where is the world’s outrage?