The entrance hall to the Galilee Medical Center in northern Israel is virtually empty and silent. The roar of fighter jets and the intermittent thunder of artillery have replaced the sounds of doctors, nurses and patients at this major hospital closest to the Lebanese border.
Almost all of the hospital’s staff and patients have gone underground.
Reaching the hospital’s nerve center today involves traversing 15-foot concrete barricades and multiple blast doors, then descending several floors into a labyrinthine underground complex.
That’s where thousands of patients and hospital workers have been for the past six months as strikes intensified between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, just six miles to the north.
The underground operation at the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya is one of the most striking examples of how life in northern Israel has changed since Hezbollah began launching almost daily attacks against the Israeli army in October in solidarity with Hamas, the group backed by Iran that led the attack on southern Israel that month.
The cross-border fire has led tens of thousands of Israelis to evacuate cities, villages and schools and forced factories and businesses to close. On the Lebanese side of the border, tens of thousands more have fled their homes.
The hospital had been preparing for such a scenario for years, given its proximity to one of the region’s most volatile borders.
“We knew this moment would come, but we didn’t know when,” Dr. Masad Barhoum, the hospital’s CEO, said in an interview last week.
Hours after the Hamas-led attack on October 7, staff members at Galilee Medical Center feared that Hezbollah could mount a similar attack. Even before the government issued evacuation orders, hospital executives decided to relocate most of the vast complex to a backup underground annex. They reduced the 775-bed hospital to 30 percent of its capacity in case it suddenly needed to house waves of new trauma patients.
“It is our duty to protect the people here,” Dr. Barhoum said. “This is what I’ve been preparing for my whole life.”
The hospital’s imposing internal medicine ward is now empty, its wide, neon-lit hallways shrouded in silence. At the ward’s current location underground, the hums of hospital machinery mix with the beeps of golf carts hauling supplies through narrow tunnels that open into the hospital parking lot, offering the only hint of light. solar.
Patients lie in beds separated by moving curtains in a maze of hallways. Visitors sit on plastic chairs in a makeshift waiting room, as the space is too full to allow everyone a bedside visit. The tubes and cables running through the ceiling give the space the feel of an engine room.
In the neonatal intensive care unit, new parents in protective gowns huddle together to bottle-feed their baby in a dimly lit room. The doctors perform a procedure on another small patient a few meters away.
The neonatal unit was the first to move underground on Oct. 7, said Dr. Vered Fleisher Sheffer, director of the unit.
“Even though everyone feels safer here,” he said, “it’s a challenge because we’re human and now we have to stay underground.”
His unit also went underground in 2006, during Israel’s last all-out war against Hezbollah: Dr. Fleisher Sheffer remembers traveling to the hospital over arid roads as air raid sirens blared. One day a rocket hit the ophthalmology ward, but the patients had already been transferred, hospital officials said.
That war lasted little more than a month and the threat from Hezbollah was felt less in the years that followed. October 7th changed that.
The day before New York Times journalists visited the hospital, a Hezbollah attack hit a nearby Bedouin village, wounding 17 soldiers and two civilians. The wounded were taken to the hospital’s ICU, where one of the soldiers died on Sunday.
“These are our neighbors,” said Dr. Fleisher Sheffer, referring to Hezbollah militants. “It’s not like they’re going anywhere, and neither are we.”