Northern hospitals move out of underground bunkers after months of war

NAHARIYA — Debbie Cohen, the head nurse of one of the two nursery departments at Galilee Medical Center, looked down at a row of newborn babies.

A grey December rain fell outside the windows and the newborns were swaddled in cozy blankets.

For 14 months of the war, while Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel, Cohen and her staff of 16 nurses had been working in underground, fortified rooms that were dark and windowless.

Then, on December 8, 11 days after the temporary 60-day ceasefire with Hezbollah took effect, the maternity departments and nurseries returned to their regular wards in the Women’s Health Wing.

“I feel like I’ve returned home,” Cohen said.

Hezbollah-led forces began to attack Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis on October 8, 2023, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war there.

That war began on October 7, 2023, when some 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst across the border from Gaza into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people and seizing 251 hostages amid acts of brutality and sexual assault.

Hospitals across northern Israel, from Nahariya to Haifa to Safed, were instructed to transfer their operations to bunker-like facilities with extra protection from attacks at the end of September after the pager and walkie-talkie blasts in Lebanon, which killed more than 30 members of Hezbollah and wounded thousands of others.

Even before the Health Ministry and the IDF Homefront Command issued directives for the northern hospitals, the staff at Nahariya’s Galilee Medical Center –less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the northern border — began to move units down into the hospital’s fortified underground facility.

Throughout the war, the Galilee Medical Center, as well as Ziv Medical Center in Safed, remained on heightened alert, stockpiling food and supplies in case they became “separate islands” due to infrastructure and communication shutdowns, mass casualties and destruction.

During the months of the conflict with Hezbollah, the two northernmost hospitals and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa treated 1,578 civilians and 3,391 soldiers.

“The last few months were the most challenging,” said Dr. Tsvi Sheleg, deputy director at the Galilee Medical Center and in charge of the hospital’s emergency preparedness. However, after the temporary ceasefire was signed, northern hospitals began moving their staff back to the regular facilities.

“It’s easy to get used to the calm with the ceasefire, but it could happen again,” Sheleg said. “We don’t know what will be, and we’re still prepared to go underground again.”

Lessons of the war in Safed

Prof. Salman Zarka, director of the Ziv Medical Center in Safed, 11 kilometers (7 miles) from the Lebanese border, said that as soon as the ceasefire went into effect, hospital staff began trying to get back to their routine services, “providing our people in the north with all the services they need, especially after a year of war.”

He said that the staff is “thinking and considering the lessons that we learned from this war.”

“We are working with the Health Ministry and with the Home Front Command to improve some areas in the hospital that we might need in case another war erupts in our area,” Zarka told The Times of Israel by telephone. “We will not go back to the standards that we had during this war.”

He said he believed that within the first few months of 2025, “we will have a plan in place to improve the security in the hospital. I am optimistic that we’ll be able to close a part of these gaps.”

In Haifa, a parking lot is again just a space for cars

At Haifa’s Bnei Zion Hospital in the Hadar neighborhood, the less mobile, high-risk patients and the neonatal unit which had been moved into a secure, underground ward for the war’s last two months, were moved back to their regular departments in early December.

A spokesperson said that the hospital’s emergency room remains in a protected safe ward.

Deputy director Dr. Yael Shachor-Meyouhas at the Rambam Medical Center in the Haifa Bay area said that as the war intensified, the Home Front Command had instructed the hospital to be prepared for incoming rockets every four minutes.

Despite the threat of frequent incoming rockets, she said, the hospital still “tried hard to keep to our routines, perform surgeries and give ambulatory services.”

The hospital, which had built its underground facilities for war emergencies, housed patients there after the war escalated in late September. Now that there is a ceasefire, she said, the facility is used once again as a parking lot.

“We were relieved that the rockets didn’t come every four minutes,” Shachor-Meyouhas said. “But even now, we’re ready for anything.”

‘They are heroes’

During the war, the conditions at the Galilee Medical Center “weren’t easy,” said Kate Naumenko, the head nurse of the orthopedic surgery wards.

“Men and women sometimes had to sleep side by side, and there was hardly any room for physiotherapy and no privacy,” Naumenko said. “There was no natural light.”

Then, her face lit up into a smile as she looked around the ward.

“You can see I’m happy,” she said.

It will take a while before the staff “gets back to routine,” Naumenko said. In other parts of the hospital, renovations are continuing after being on hold for more than a year.

Being underground, without natural air or light, in crowded conditions was challenging “for the patients, the newborns and the staff,” the Galilee Medical Center’s Cohen agreed.

She emphasized that the war was difficult “both for the country and for people on a personal level.”

Some hospital staff members were among the 60,000 residents who were evacuated from northern towns on the Lebanon border and relocated to other towns. Others, Cohen said, had “husbands and sons in reserve duty or the standing army.”

“But they made the effort and came to work every day,” Cohen said. “They are heroes.”

Cohen described leaving the hospital and driving to her home in the Krayot, a Haifa suburb, about 22 kilometers away (13 miles), and having to get out of her car when sirens were indicating incoming rocket fire and lie on the ground.

Moreover, one of her adult twin sons, Or Yosef Cohen, 32, who was serving in the reserves near the Lebanese border, was seriously wounded by an anti-tank missile last October 17, 2023, and has been in rehabilitation ever since.

But the birth of the babies – including two new sets of twins – “is a renewal of life that gives us strength and hope,” said the nurse.

“Hearing the ‘mazel tov,’ or congratulations, makes this the happiest ward in the hospital,” she said.

What makes the hospital special is that the staff is diverse, she said. And, she added, “babies are being born here of all religions and faith together.”

“Jews, Christians, Muslims, Druze and Circassians,” she said. “We’re one nation, one heart.”