Sheba Medical Centre at Tel HaShomer, near Ramat Gan, is staffed by 1,700 doctors and 2,000 nurses and is equipped with 2,000 beds. Around 25 to 30 per cent of Israeli doctors and nurses are Arab. Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre, they have treated between 1,600 and 1,700 injured civilians and soldiers. The hospital also treated 36 returning hostages – and one dog.
“What’s most important is for the hostages to come back alive as soon as possible,” Dr Itai Pessach, director of the Children’s Hospital at Sheba Medical Centre, Israel’s largest hospital, told the JC. “If they come back alive, we will be able to help them. Every minute that passes makes me wonder if that will ever happen,” added Pessach, who heads Sheba’s special medical team caring for returning captives.
“Unlike the chaos of war, hostages were something we never had to prepare for. We never knew it would become our role to care for children, women, elderly people, soldiers and civilians that were held by a terrorist organisation,” said Pessach. With no written medical precedents, he explained how he and his team came up with protocols and best practices to receive and treat returning hostages. “We have a comprehensive psychological paediatric trauma team. We started gathering information from experts who had dealt with prisoners of war, those who treated Gilad Shalit [the IDF soldier released in 2011 after five years in Hamas captivity], teams in the US who dealt with mass shootings, teams in Kosovo, and in Africa who treated the victims of Boko Haram,” Pessach explained.
He gathered 150 staff members – physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists and nutritionists. He trained them, taught them the new protocols and ran detailed simulations. “We prepared a quiet secluded environment where lights were dimmed,” he added.
Two weeks into the war, Sheba was ready to receive hostages. The first group came in November during a ceasefire deal with Hamas, about 50 days into the war. “We prepared their families to receive them. The first encounter needed to happen very quickly. They needed to meet their relatives before they met the medical team,” Pessach said.
“The hostages wanted to talk, a lot were really eager to touch and hug everyone, they wanted this close personal warmth and interaction. This was very different from what we had expected,” he added. “We had elderly women with complications due to lack of medical care. We had physical abuse, the implications of which we saw a little bit later. Most of them were malnourished,” he continued. “We made sure that there was a hairdresser and a personal hygienist to take care of the captives.” Pessach told the story of one captive who could not sleep, or sit still. “We were very concerned about her, she told us she had hardly slept throughout captivity. Then she decided to have her nails done. She gave her hands to the manicurist and slept for ten hours on that chair. That was the moment she felt human again,” he said.
Pessach and his team also received hostages freed by the Israel Defence Forces during rescue operations. “We received them before they had the time to understand that their captivity was over; before we could notify their families,” he told the JC.
“You treat the hostages and just across the corridor, in the trauma centre, you treat the soldier who was injured during the rescue operation and died. Grief on one side and happiness on the other,” he added.
Pessach noted that his team stayed in touch with every family and every returned hostage. “We established a clinic for the care of hostages who came back and their families. Even though their physical state is improving, their psychological state will remain challenging for a long time. This is a lifelong problem, mentally and physically,” he said.
As for those who still haven’t come back, Pessach stressed the impact of prolonged and potentially isolated captivity. “The state of the people that are going to be coming back now will be very different. I was amazed by the resilience of those who were rescued. Their ability to support each other and to hold on for some after four or five months in captivity kept them sort of sane and in some state of physical wellness,” he said.
Sheba Medical Center has treated many of the IDF soldiers wounded in the ongoing conflict. According to the hospital, if soldiers injured in Gaza arrive within an hour, their survival rate is 99 per cent.
