As patients stay safe underground, a doctor takes stock of rocket's toll
NAHARIYA, Israel -- Dr. Uri Rehany picked his way through the wreckage of the Western Galilee Hospital's eye department where a Hezbollah rocket had exploded, destroying the entire floor.
Rehany, 59, the director of the eye unit, said he was first on the scene when the rocket hit Friday in this northern Israeli town, 6 miles south of the border with Lebanon. It was one out of more than 2,000 rockets fired by Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon into Israel in the past three weeks of warfare.
``We heard an enormous explosion," Rehany recalled yesterday. ``We knew it hit the building somewhere. We waited for a few minutes to be sure the building was stable enough, then we started to climb one floor after the other to see where it hit."
The rocket devastated patient rooms and medical systems, including sensitive ocular ultrasound and topography equipment worth more than $120,000. Twisted pieces of metal and smashed masonry crashed down onto the empty hospital beds, barely recognizable amid the damage. A gaping hole which was once a window shows where the missile struck, sending shrapnel and high explosives tearing through the ward.
None of the hospital's 400 patients was hurt. They had been evacuated to a basement bunker hospital when the conflict began on July 12.
The recently completed surgical wing was built to withstand attack and appeared to have escaped serious damage. The rocket lodged in the reinforced floor of the ward, preventing structural damage to the rest of the building and the floors below. The security windows blew out but landed in one piece on the ground far below without smashing into deadly shards.
Among the underground patients were two of Rehany's most recent transplant recipients. A few days before the rocket hit the hospital, he transplanted the corneas of a child killed by another Hezbollah rocket into two patients -- one Jewish, one Muslim.
Rehany, a renowned corneal transplant surgeon, trained at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. Born in Baghdad, he and his family were expelled from their home when he was 3 years old. He lived in refugee camps in Cyprus and Israel until he was 8.
He said that before Israel ended its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, about one-third of his patients were Lebanese. ``They don't have any modern medicine in the area from the border up to Beirut. They relied on us. They had no facilities for eye surgery, which requires really modern medical care."
``When we left and Hezbollah took over, everything was destroyed," he said.
He said of the Hezbollah rocket barrage, ``They target civilians -- hospitals, schools, whatever they can. We are so sorry when we hear that something happened to a civilian by mistake, but they specifically aim at civilian targets. They're not even ashamed of it. . . . I hope that the end of this war will see a new beginning and an open border which will benefit all of us," Rehany said.
