The Hadassah Medical Centre, home to Jerusalem’s largest emergency ward, treats the city’s wounded regardless of whether they are victims or attackers.
A spokesperson for the hospital said that “the conflict comes into the hospital but we do not allow it to overcome the ethics of the hospital”.
The hospital’s mixed Jewish-Arab medical staff includes Head of Surgery Ahmed Eid, who operated on a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was stabbed and arrived at the hospital having lost a large quantity of blood.
“This is the situation and it has become very routine for us”, said Eid, an Arab Israeli. “What happens in the country also affects us but it doesn’t influence our medicine. Hadassah is a very special place”.
Surgeon Daniel Weiss added: “We have patients of all kinds coming in. It doesn’t matter who they are. We treat them all… it’s surreal, but that is the way we are”.
Tensions remain between those treated, in some cases leading to confrontation. 22-year old Odel Bennett was seriously injured in a stabbing attack that killed her husband Aharon and left her child lightly wounded, with her pleas for help mocked by local Arab residents who told her to “die”.
Upon learning that a Palestinian woman who had stabbed an Israeli man some days later was being treated in the same ward, Bennett had an anxiety attack and later said: “It is very, very hard to have a victim next to someone who tried to murder… I understand that the hospital has to take them, I just don’t know why they aren’t treated in prisons. That’s the reality”.
Others treated at the hospital include a 31-year-old Palestinian woman, who was critically wounded when an explosive device detonated in her car in the West Bank on Sunday.
She is said to have proclaimed “God is great” before detonating a gas canister. Letters praising Palestinian martyrs were found in her possession, though her family denies this account.
