Israel lays foundations for world’s largest underground hospital
It’s a damn shame Israel has to do this because of all the dangerous threats by their hateful anti-Semitic neighbor’s determination to murder Israelis.
JERUSALEM - Israel’s Rambam medical center in Haifa is digging in as part of a massive project to fortify the center against what officials hope the emergency facility will never have to endure, a direct conventional, chemical, or biological attack.
The 1,000-bed hospital came under several Katyusha rocket attacks by Hezbollah in Lebanon during Israel’s month-long war against the organization in the summer of 2006, and the hospital management admit that they weren’t prepared.
“This is not something we took into account. In fact, the hospital itself could be vulnerable… that we were saving lives on the one hand, but at the same time, were vulnerable to loss of life because of deadly missile attacks,” said Professor Karl Skorecki, who directs medical and research development at the center, according to a statement sent to Xinhua.
Rambam is the country’s largest and most comprehensive center of its kind in the north, and serves some 75,000 people annually, and a half a million more as outpatients, including trauma treatment, oncology, and neurosurgery.
The center, which boasts 45 medical units, nine institutes, six laboratories and 30 administrative and maintenance departments, is also Israeli Army’s principal medical facility for the Northern Command.
“For 33 days, it was the major hospital in northern Israel that was, in itself, under attack, having to lead the treatment and therapy for all the casualties of the civilian population around us and at the same time, the casualties of the army that were brought to us from the fierce battles in Lebanon,” said Rambam General-Director and Chief Executive Officer Rafael Beyar.
So, in order to plan for the worst-case scenario in the face of increasing missile threats from the north and beyond, the hospital chiefs decided to build what they say will be the world’s largest war-hardened underground medical facility.