As so often happens after disasters worldwide, Israel was among the very first countries to respond to the blast in Beirut, offering medical help to the affected people. In this case, those affected are Lebanese, many of them Muslims, and their country, Lebanon, is still officially at war with Israel. None of that mattered to Israel in offering to help. The story is here.
The heads of several Israeli hospitals have reached out to Lebanese officials and the United Nations offering medical support to the country’s wounded.
“It hurts to see the children – little children – crying and injured,” Dr. Masad Barhoum, director-general of Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya told The Jerusalem Post. “People without children – their lives destroyed in an instance. They need medical and psychological help.
Barhoum, a Christian Arab, speaks Arabic. On Wednesday, he took to social networks and the radio appealing directly in their language to the Lebanese president and prime minister, and even Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, to allow him to help….
“The idea is to help them and return them home in peace,” said Barhoum. “We have no agenda, there are no enemies in this situation. As medical professionals, we do not differentiate.”
Barhoum said that no hospital system could stand up to the task of treating so many injured people at one time – estimates are that more than 4,000 are in need of care. This is even more so the situation in Lebanon, where the country is faced with deep economic challenges. He said he reads Lebanese social media posts and he sees the people are angry, confused and even disillusioned. The government, too, is afraid to make the wrong move as the people are watching closely….
Why would accepting the offer of Israeli medical help be a “wrong move” on the part of the Lebanese government ? Because so great is the inculcated hatred for the Jewish state, that some in Lebanon, and especially those in the terror group Hezbollah, would prefer to refuse such aid. They would rather see some of the Lebanese wounded suffer, and some die, rather than accept Israel’s offer of help which, if accepted, would from Hezbollah’s point of view, earn Israel a good press. And that is unacceptable to Hassan Nasrallah and his paymasters in Tehran.
Hospital head Dr. Salman Zarka said he had been in direct contact with the IDF Northern Command and reached out to the UN to offer assistance.
He told the Post that until 2000, his hospital treated Lebanese citizens on a regular basis.
“Two years ago, a Lebanese woman came to visit us at the medical center,” Zarka recalled. “She told us that she and her mother had received medical care 30 years ago and that she still remembers us and wanted to say thank you….
Israeli doctors have been providing medical care to Lebanese who cannot obtain the same level of care in Lebanon for many decades. Many of those Lebanese patients have been treated for free. Some of them have diseases that Lebanese hospitals lacked the expertise to treat; others arrived with wounds they received during one of the many intra-Arab conflicts (as during the Lebanese Civil War); they have included both Muslims and Christians. Palestinians, too, have received such care if their own hospitals lack what Israeli doctors can provide or, in some cases, they simply prefer treatment by Israeli medical personnel to that provided by their own doctors. Even members of terror groups and their relatives have been treated by Israeli doctors. Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, a group dedicated to killing Israelis, had his own daughter brought to an Israeli hospital for treatment just a few weeks after the war between Israel and Hamas ended. The Israelis treated her for complications she had suffered after a routine procedure in a Gazan hospital. Haniyeh knew she would receive the very best care; after all, more than a thousand Gazans are treated in Israeli hospitals, often for free, every year. The very people the Hamas leader was trying to kill – Israelis — were the ones he trusted most with his daughter’s life.
“If there is an international delegation then Lebanon won’t put any condition that there not be Israelis – that would be absurd,” he said.
Such a condition – “Israeli doctors must keep out, we’re Arabs” – would indeed be absurd, by any moral calculus other than that of the Hezbollah haters who unfortunately, these days call the shots in Lebanon. We’ll see if Dr. Zarka’s optimism about the common sense and decency of the Lebanese will be confirmed, or whether Hezbollah will be able to prevent Israeli doctors from joining a medical team in Cyprus.
Shortly before press time, a source in UNIFIL told KAN News that Israel is in the advanced stages of talks to transfer specific equipment to Lebanon, although neither Israel nor UNIFIL would confirm the report.
Not only is Israel offering to treat Lebanese wounded in its own hospitals, and providing nursing care to the less seriously wounded in facilities right on the border with Lebanon, but it is also ready to send medical equipment to Lebanese hospitals, which, overwhelmed with having to suddenly treat 4,000 wounded, have been suffering from a dearth of such equipment.
Israel is negotiating sending equipment to detect missing people under collapsed buildings, Israel Hayom reported.
That equipment to detect people under collapsed buildings is a specialty of Israel, which first perfected a Trapped Person Locator. A refusal by Lebanon of the offer of such equipment could mean the unnecessary deaths of dozens among the hundreds who are still missing. But Hezbollah won’t care. It can’t have Israeli personnel and equipment save the day.
Israel has long provided medical assistance to countries in need.
Prof. Elhanan Bar-On, director of the Israel Center for Disaster Medicine and Humanitarian Response at Sheba Medical Center, spoke to Israel Radio on Wednesday and explained that the Jewish state could offer both nursing care on the border or accept injured patients into Israeli hospitals.
“Of course, sending medical personnel to Lebanon is not practical – there are forces there that could interfere with such an operation,” he said….
Of course. Hezbollah would think nothing of “interfering” with Israeli medical personnel – including harming them physically — who arrived in Lebanon to help treat Lebanese.
“Israel is ready to help,” added Zarka. “It’s a shame that people will die for no reason.”…
Four Israeli hospitals – the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, the Ziv Medical Center in Safed, the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, and the Sheba Hospital just outside Tel Aviv – have all stepped forward with offers to threat the Lebanese wounded. They are ready with doctors, nurses, top-of-the-line trauma centers with plenty of empty beds to treat Lebanese wounded. The Israelis are further offering to help with equipment and teams to locate those still alive and trapped under the rubble. The have offered to send medical equipment urgently needed for use by Lebanese hospitals that have been suddenly swamped with thousands of wounded. But there has been no answer — only silence — from the Lebanese.
Israel asks for nothing in return for its medical assistance. It only wants to help. For Hassan Nasrallah, that’s an offer he insists be refused. Lebanese lives for him are cheap. He’s proved it by choosing to store his ammonium nitrate in a hanger right at the busy Port of Beirut. He’s proved it, too, by hiding his vast armory, including 150,000 missiles, throughout civilian areas of Lebanon. It’s a way to hold much of Lebanon hostage, so that if the terror group does drag the country into a war with Israel, civilians will necessarily be collateral damage.
For Hezbollah, Israeli help in treating the wounded of Beirut is exactly what must be prevented. Such aid will only make Israel “look good” in the eyes of the Lebanese people, and among other Arabs, too. It might even improve Israel’s standing at the U.N. And that would never do. If some Lebanese must die, and others have their wounds worsen, because they were not allowed to receive the first-rate treatment being offered to them in Nahariya, Safed, Haifa, and Tel Aviv, Hassan Nasrallah thinks, then so be it.