For most of the past year, the war has arrived at Soroka Medical Center by ambulance. Civilians and soldiers wounded across southern Israel are rushed through its emergency entrance, even as the hospital continues to treat thousands of patients whose lives have little to do with the battlefield. Then, last year, the war struck the hospital itself. An Iranian missile hit the Soroka complex, damaging several buildings and forcing staff to reorganize their work overnight. This International Women’s Day, three doctors at Soroka reflected on what the past months have looked like from inside the hospital’s walls.
Their experiences move between the emergency room and the battlefield, between operating rooms and bomb shelters, and between the professional demands of medicine and the personal realities of family life during war. Their stories offer a glimpse of what it means to stand at the intersection of medicine, conflict and resilience, and of the women who continue to do so every day.
Dr. Ofira Azulay: "You put everything you’re feeling aside, and you just work.”
Dr. Ofira Azulay: "You put everything you’re feeling aside, and you just work.”
On the morning of October 7, Dr. Ofira Azulay was not in the emergency room where she normally spends her days. She was in Tel Aviv with her family for the Simchat Torah holiday when the sirens began. “Very quickly the hospital understood that something unusual was happening,” she recalls. “They declared a mass casualty event at the highest level and asked the staff to come in.”
Azulay and her husband, an orthopedic surgeon at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, were with their four children, including a one-year-old. The decision to leave, she recalls, was not simple. “We had four kids with us, a baby, the sirens, the uncertainty. But we both felt we couldn’t stay where we were. We knew we had to get to the hospital.” (Read More)
