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Haifa, Israel – In the corner of the underground parking garage at Rambam Hospital in the Israeli port city of Haifa, just next to a stop sign and a ramp to ground level, a patient undergoes dialysis treatment.
The Sammy Ofer Fortified Underground Emergency Hospital, brought to full alert after the October 7 Hamas terror attacks, is an answer to an untenable situation.
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The underground medical complex opened a decade ago, based on lessons learned in 2006 during the Second Lebanon War when Haifa was subjected to rocket attacks.
“We moved all of our patients to the basement of the hospital,” recalled Dr. Avi Weissman, Rambam’s medical director and chief of anesthesiology.
“It was terrible.”
It prompted hospital officials to look to other options, which eventually led to the opening of the underground hospital.
Rambam Hospital, founded in 1938, is older than even the modern state of Israel. It has grown over the years to a sprawling campus on the northern tip of Haifa, just west of the city’s busy shipping port.
It’s the fifth-largest hospital in the country, Israel’s largest trauma hospital and the only level-one trauma centre in northern Israel.
In 2014, instead of of building dedicated underground wards that would sit unused most of the time, the hospital got an underground parking garage that, thanks to medical utilities and connections hidden behind panels, could be converted into a full 2,000-bed hospital in less than 72 hours.
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While the underground ward has seen occasional partial use, most notably during the COVID-19 pandemic, October 7 prompted officials to fully deploy the facility for the first time in its history.
National Post was given a tour around the sprawling complex, which still bears unmistakable signs of being a parking garage, complete with painted parking stalls and lane markers, traffic signs and directions to payment stations.
The garage is hardened for all aboveground attacks except for nuclear, and features a sophisticated air filtration system designed to protect against chemical warfare.
Colour-coded zones designed to help visitors remember where they parked are used to denote which medical department belongs where.
The underground hospital’s surgical suite is located across from a sign reminding visitors to take their parking tickets to the payment machines on the main floor.
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Aside from serving Israelis, Rambam Hospital has provided both routine and urgent care to Palestinian residents of the West Bank until the war began on Oct. 7 and the borders were closed.
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“We have an agreement with (the Palestinian Authority), we had daily conversations, they came here a lot,” Weissman said.
“Almost every day I got a request or two for either trauma patients or cancer patients, mostly children with cancer, and if we have room, we take them.”
Even though Palestinians don’t pay into the government’s health-care system, they’re charged the same nominal fee that Israelis pay for care.
“Because we’re neighbours, we think it’s our responsibility. It’s been like this forever,” Weissman said.
The hospital was also where children from Gaza went for dialysis or kidney transplants before the war. Many of the Israelis who lived in the south and helped drive patients to the hospital from Gaza were among those kidnapped or murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7, Weissman said.
A small number of Palestinians were undergoing treatment at Rambam when the war began. They’re still there.
“If they go back, they’ll die,” Weissman said.
He said he felt heartbroken at the Palestinian patients who relied on care provided at Rambam.
“It’s terrible,” he said.
“I mean, we treated them — they’re chronic patients, they’re kidney patients, they’re very attached to the staff here. Those are the side-effects of war that people don’t see or hear.”
National Post
bpassifiume@postmedia.com
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