While Iran fires missiles, Israel moves entire hospitals underground.
Israeli doctors return from abroad by any means necessary, babies are born three floors below the ground, and a nation’s medical system keeps doing God's work during war.
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This is a guest essay by Mitch Schneider, who writes from Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Sapir Asulin was 37-weeks pregnant when the sirens began screaming over Haifa. She and her husband Moshe had driven to Rambam Medical Center for what should have been a routine delivery of their first child, their first son.
The delivery room was on minus one. Then the hospital moved operations deeper. She was taken down through the corridors, past the blast doors, into the fortified levels below the city. The cesarean was performed in a fully equipped operating room on the minus three floor, the deepest level of the largest underground hospital in the world, while Iranian missiles were falling on Haifa above them.
Their son was born underground.
Sapir and Moshe’s first words as parents: “We feel safe and hope for better days for everyone and for the IDF soldiers.”1 First-time parents, first moments of parenthood, first thought: the soldiers.
Far from Haifa, another story of the same war was unfolding. Dr. Yelena Kishinevsky was in London with her daughter Michal for a holiday getaway. A mother and her daughter in one of the world’s great cities, far from the pressure of the ICU, far from the weight of the decisions she makes every day as director of general intensive care at Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot, a city just southeast of Tel Aviv. Then her phone lit up.
The airspace closed. The flights stopped. Every instinct said wait. Stay safe. Come home when it’s over.
She made her way to Cyprus with her daughter, found a ZIM cargo ship loading at the Port of Limassol, and boarded it. The vessel was loaded with shipping containers. She sat strapped in, in the cold, Michal beside her, the metal deck beneath them, the sound of containers shifting in the dark as the ship moved east through the night toward a country at war.
“We didn’t hesitate for a moment,” she said. She knew it was a cargo ship. She boarded anyway.2
In 2006, Hezbollah fired rockets at Haifa for more than a month. Rockets fell on Rambam’s own grounds. There was no Iron Dome. Rambam Medical Center shook. Nurses pushed patients in wheelchairs through corridors while sirens went off outside. Doctors stood at bedsides making impossible decisions in real time: Move them or shelter in place. Some patients couldn’t be moved. Some couldn’t wait. The hospital kept functioning, but barely, and only because none of the rockets made a direct hit.
In Israel, the question is never if there will be another war, only when.
Israeli shipping magnate Sammy Ofer grew up in Haifa. He watched what happened in 2006. He wrote a check for $25 million and said, “Never again.”
It took eight years to build three underground levels beneath a parking garage equipped with 1,400 beds, 24 fully fortified operating rooms, a maternity ward, a dialysis center, an ICU, and a decontamination center for chemical and biological attacks — all designed to be self-sufficient for days with its own power, its own oxygen, its own water. Where there used to be parking spaces, there are now ICU beds, built because someone understood that when the next war came, the hospital had to be ready.
Since the start of Operation Roaring Lion, it was ready. But hospitals are not only buildings. They are the people who refuse to stay away from them.
Professor Ilan Shelef wasn’t thinking about war when his week began. He is the head of imaging at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, the largest city in Israel’s Negev desert. His wife Yonat is a nurse at the same hospital. They had flown to London for the reason people fly to London with joy in their hearts: Their granddaughter had just been born. They were there for the first days of her life.
They were at the airport on Saturday morning, bags packed, about to board their flight home, when Operation Roaring Lion suddenly began. Their flight to Israel was cancelled — every flight to Israel was cancelled — so they left their newborn granddaughter in London and flew to Athens to wait for a rescue flight because Soroka Medical Center needed them back.
“It’s a complicated feeling to be abroad during an emergency,” said Professor Shelef. “It doesn’t feel right to be a department head and not be in the country during such a difficult situation. It’s hard and uncomfortable to be outside Israel when things like this happen.”
Hard and uncomfortable. Those were his words — like leaving a newborn granddaughter in London to fly toward a war is simply the kind of thing that makes you uncomfortable, not the kind of thing that makes you a hero.
When Israel’s Ministry of Health instructed Rambam Medical Center to begin the transfer, the directive was clear: all patients underground within eight to 10 hours. The ICU patients went first, many of them on ventilators. Each one moved by a dedicated medical team, assisted by Israeli Navy personnel and the IDF’s Home Front Command, family members walking alongside through the corridors and down into the fortified levels below.
Not to mention the ventilator carts and battery buffers on oxygen lines — every monitor, every drip, every machine keeping someone alive moved with the patient. Patients were transferred according to a prearranged plan, each department moving to its designated underground area. At the same time, nearly 200 non-urgent patients were discharged to free up beds for casualties expected from elsewhere in northern Israel.
Then the maternity ward. Then the surgical wards. Then every other department, systematically, according to a plan that had been drilled, practiced, revised, and drilled again. 700 patients were transferred across 11 hours — and not one lost. That’s not a logistics achievement; that’s a medical achievement of the highest order.
It was accomplished by Jews and Arabs working side by side. Nearly one third of Rambam Medical Center’s staff are Arab-Israeli. On the day the missiles fell on Haifa, they moved 700 patients to safety together. That detail rarely makes the news. It should.
These two stories were part of something much bigger.
There are 1,145 Israeli medical professionals stranded abroad when the airspace closed, including doctors, nurses, surgeons, anesthesiologists. People were at conferences, visiting family, or on holiday — overwhelmingly, trying to get home. The Ministry of Health built a dedicated smartphone app overnight so stranded staff could register their location. Hospital directors submitted priority lists of the most urgently needed employees. WhatsApp groups formed across the medical system, hospital by hospital, department by department. The state has been covering every transportation cost.
I struggle to think of another country where this happens, where medical professionals stranded abroad during a war don’t wait to be rescued. They organize themselves using apps, cargo ships, rescue flights, whatever it takes to get back to their patients.
Rambam and Soroka medical centers weren’t alone.
Within hours of the war’s first incoming rocket sirens, something happened that has never happened at this scale before: Hospitals across Israel began moving into their protected facilities simultaneously. At Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tikva (just east of Tel Aviv), the CEO Professor Efrat Bron-Harlev pointed to one of her young patients. “This cart is his artificial heart,” she said. “He has been living here while waiting for a heart transplant. He moved to the underground area together with 119 other children. This is not just a hospital. It’s his home.”3
At Rabin Medical Center next door, 500 beds moved deep underground. Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center followed suit. From Haifa to Jerusalem to Tel Aviv to Beersheba, entire hospitals disappeared below ground while missiles were still in the air — thousands of patients, thousands of staff, an entire national medical system relocating underground during a hot war and ongoing missile barrages.
Since fighting began on February 28th, more than 1,500 people have been evacuated to hospitals across the country. Dozens of babies have been born in the fortified levels of Rambam Medical Center since the war began, including a set of triplets. Einat Nissim, 39 years old, arrived for the birth of her 11th child. She was told the delivery room was on the floor minus one, then moved to minus three. One hour after the maternity ward went underground, she delivered a daughter — 3.5 kilograms (7.7 pounds) and healthy.
The Ministry of Health issued a directive ensuring that any infant evacuated to a hospital as an unidentified patient would be fed from the breast milk bank, even if the mother had been called up for military reserve service and couldn’t provide milk. The system even accounted for the smallest details.
And then there’s ZIM. I’m not talking about a military vessel or government operation, but ZIM Integrated Shipping Services, an Israeli cargo company — the kind of company that moves containers between ports and doesn’t make the news. When the Israeli airspace promptly closed on February 28th, ZIM didn’t wait to be asked. ZIM Australia, a container vessel that hauls cargo between Mediterranean ports, was turned around and sent to the Port of Limassol in Cyprus. It docked in Haifa, unloaded, turned around immediately, and went back for more. CEO Eli Glickman said it simply:
“As in any emergency, ZIM places the interests of the company and the state above all and contributes its part to the national effort. The transport of passengers and vital goods will continue as long as Israel needs and instructs us.”
For two years, protesters tried to disrupt ZIM for the crime of being Israeli. In Melbourne, dock workers blocked six consecutive shifts to prevent ZIM vessels from unloading. In Italy, protesters shut ports from Livorno to Venice — all to keep an Israeli shipping company from doing its job.
But ZIM is not an isolated story; it is part of a Jewish state built to function under immense and unpredictable pressures.
The same country that built this hospital underground also trains for disasters the way others train for war. Doctors drill mass casualty events the way fighter pilots drill interceptions. Entire wards rehearse evacuations for scenarios they hope will never arrive, running timed drills, revising protocols, drilling again. The IDF field hospital is the only World Health Organization certified Type 3 field hospital in the world. Israel doesn’t only prepare for its own disasters; it runs toward everyone else’s too.
The Iranian regime and its terror proxies have fired hundreds of missiles at Israel over several days. Sirens sound daily at every hour of the day and night across the entire country — Haifa, Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Jerusalem. These are not remote military installations; they are full-fledged cities — the cities that contain Israel’s greatest hospitals, the cities that invested in medicine, in research, in the infrastructure of human life.
In fact, four Israeli hospitals ranked in the world’s top 250, including Sheba Medical Center at number seven.4 These aren’t just regional hospitals; they are global research institutions where patients from around the world come for treatment and benefit from their expertise. And the Iranian regime targets the cities that built them.
That is the difference between the two sides: One invests its resources in terror proxies, missiles, and nukes it boasts about using, while the other invests in emergency rooms, maternity wards, intensive care units, and operating rooms that can successfully function even during war.
“Operation Roaring Lions: Latest Update.” Rambam Health Care Campus.
“‘We didn’t hesitate for a moment’: 180 Israeli medical workers to return on rescue flight.” Ynet News.
“Missiles above, newborns below: Israeli hospitals shift critical care underground.” Fox News.
Newsweek
Israel puts hospitals safely underground as Hamas puts command centers UNDER the same facilities in Gaza while diverting food and any aid money to further their sick actions. What a comparison. Islam has a 7th-century mindset and sees their nefarious activities as totally acceptable because, in their twisted view, they're doing God's work. How monstrous. Humanity IS a four-letter word to them and when Iran finally falls as it is today then there will be a greater chance for regional peace.
I so admire Israel for their innovations and discoveries and inventions. And for the effort they place on Iraelies lives.