We Cannot Forget What Happened at Israel’s Soroka Hospital

Soroka Medical Center is about 25 miles from Gaza. It is the hospital that took care of most of the wounded after the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7th that claimed the lives of more than 1,400 Israelis.

The head of the hospital, Shlomi Codish, described how his staff approached one of the largest mass casualty events due to a terror event in history. What they went through should be required reading for every member of the international medical community.

In the first 16 hours, the Soroka emergency department treated 680 patients, 120 of whom were critically wounded. As victims started arriving, the hospital discharged at least a hundred patients to make room. They activated staff, many of whom were off because it was a Jewish holiday.

“This means people are now expected to get into their cars and drive to the hospital while air sirens are going off around them,” Codish said. They left behind their families, not knowing if their loved ones would be alive when they returned, or if they would return themselves. Still, “everyone has an enormous sense of duty. People just did what needs to be done to get to the hospital and save lives.”

One of the first patients requiring surgery was a pregnant woman who was at full term. She was shot in the abdomen multiple times. “Reading the surgical report describing gunshot woods extracted from an unborn infant is beyond what the human mind needs to hear or know about,” Codish said, describing the injuries as being due to “shooting at point blank.” The mother survived but her baby died.

Codish told me about other patients his team cared for. A young woman shot in her pajamas. A child with four gunshot wounds. There were twin babies found in a house by the army many hours after the attacks on that kibbutz ended. They were hidden in a safe room, unharmed but suffering from dehydration; their parents were lying dead just outside. This was like the stories he heard from World World II, Codish said. “Let’s protect the children in a sheltered room and expose ourselves to the terrorists, so we get killed and they don’t.”