.Israel is set to establish a field hospital with 80 medical personnel inside war-torn Ukraine sometime next week, the Health Ministry announced on Saturday evening.
The field hospital will include an emergency room, a maternity ward, a children’s ward, adult wards, an outpatient clinic and a telehealth center. Its location is likely to be near Lviv, and will operate in Ukraine itself and not in neighboring border regions.
It will be operated by the Health Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, Sheba Medical Center, the Clalit HMO and medical teams from other hospitals. It will not be manned by the IDF’s medical corps as in previous state missions to disaster areas.
“We are carrying out our moral duty and extending help to the Ukrainian people,” Health Minister Nitzan Horovitz tweeted on Saturday night.
“Following the delivery of medical equipment and medicines, we will also be assisting in the field. The Health Ministry and the State of Israel are clearly standing on the side of the Ukrainian people. We will continue to help saving the lives of citizens whose world was destroyed in an instant.”
“Thank you to the Sheba Medical Center, Clalit Health Services and all the medical teams from across the country, who are once again proving their bravery and complete dedication to saving the lives of people anywhere in the world,” he added.
Prof. Elhanan Bar-On, director of Sheba Medical Center’s Israel Center for Humanitarian, Emergency and Disaster Medicine, flew to Poland with a small advance team ahead of the mission. They crossed into Ukraine to assess the situation.
Back in Israel, medical personnel from across Israel conducted a drill in the field hospital on the Sheba campus in Ramat Gan. The field hospital will be dismantled for shipment to Poland and then across the border into Ukraine. An 80-person medical team will accompany the mission over the weekend.
Last week, Israel sent a 100-ton humanitarian aid package to Ukraine and is now preparing another.
Meanwhile, Sheba Medical Center’s Sheba Beyond and voluntary emergency response organization United Hatzalah established a virtual hospital using telemedicine technologies, to treat Ukrainian refugees who fled to Moldova.
This is not the first time that Israel has deployed a field hospital in the wake of a disaster. In 2010, Israel set up a field hospital in Haiti, after a devastating earthquake, gaining plaudits from around the world.
It also set up a field hospital in Japan in 2011 after the earthquake and tsunami, in the Philippines in 2013, and set up a 60-bed field hospital – the largest ever – in Nepal in 2015.
Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 7 and March 8.
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