The IDF’s official policy is that it will treat any Syrian who requires serious medical assistance; Israel continues to let in Syria’s maimed. Yet is it more than just a humanitarian initiative?
UNDERGROUND OPERATIONS There is a certain spot on the Israeli-Syrian border where both rebel and civilian casualties are whisked away to Israeli hospitals — hinting at an unspoken alliance between moderate rebel factions and the IDF (Photos: Menachem Kalish AFP/Imagebank)
M ustafa Kamal* was used to explosions as a fighter in one of the Syrian rebel factions trying to oust the Assad regime. This time though the blast was too close for comfort — a car bomb exploded just a meter from where he was stationed in the largely destroyed town of Quneitra on the other side of the Israeli border with Syria. A sharp pain ripped through his body as he realized he’d been hit.
“I checked my body and couldn’t see my leg” he tells Mishpacha from his hospital bed at the Ziv Medical Center in Tzfas. In rapid-fire Syrian Arabic translated by hospital social worker Farras Issa he tells how he was loaded onto an old vehicle that served as an ambulance as the driver raced toward the Israeli border.
“The choice was pretty clear: If I chose to remain in Quneitra I would probably die but I could choose another way and that other way was to be evacuated to Israel. All I knew about Israel until then was that it’s the Jewish state and that Jews are heretics and murderers. All our lives our minds were poisoned and I had no idea what they’d do to me in Israel but the medic who evacuated me made it clear that my only chance for survival was to get to an Israeli hospital.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
