The Israeli charity Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) is this week conducting its 5,555th lifesaving procedure on a two-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza. 50% of the children that SACH has treated are Palestinian.
At just two weeks old, Mahmad was brought to a hospital in Gaza, breathless and failing to gain weight. His mother was told that Mahmad’s case didn’t require intervention, but she insisted otherwise: “I was sure that my son was sick, that if he had access to the right treatment he could be healed”.
The family were made aware of SACH by Dr. Abdelrahim Azab, a paediatric cardiologist in Gaza and partner of SACH. At 5 months old, he was referred to SACH and was brought to Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, Israel, where he underwent an surgical intervention that saved his life.
Speaking of SACH, his mother said: “I am so grateful to Save a Child’s Heart – they fought for my son’s life as hard as I did. We ourselves were dependent on others for their expertise, for their financial support as my husband is unemployed. Save a Child’s Heart gave us everything we needed. They are like family to me”.
Dr. Sagi Assa, Head of the Interventional Paediatric Cardiology Unit at Wolfson Hospital who performed Mahmad’s life-saving cardiac catheterisation procedure together with his team, acknowledged that children like Mahmad represent the best of what the NGO does: “Save A Child’s Heart is a global family and of course, we feel deeply connected to our closest neighbours. Being able to watch our Palestinian patients grow up before our eyes, like Ahmad, brings immeasurable joy and meaning to my life”.
2021 will be the year that SACH marks its 25th year of humanitarian activities. SACH has provided care to more than 5,500 children from 62 countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe and South America and trained more than 120 medical professionals from these countries. SACH was granted special consultative status by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (ECOSOC) and was the 2018 recipient of the prestigious United Nations Population Award.
SACH has weekly clinics for Palestinian children, bringing some 20-30 children to the Wolfson centre in Jerusalem each week. Children from Gaza are accompanied by Palestinian doctors from Gaza, who are given the opportunity to work alongside Israeli doctors.
