On 17 January 2010, days after an earthquake flattened much of Port-au-Prince, a woman eight months pregnant arrived at a field hospital set up in tents. Her baby was the first born there. Fifteen more would follow.
A hospital in a courtyard
The hospital belonged to Israel's army medical corps. It had been flown to Haiti within days of the January 2010 earthquake and set up in tents in the courtyard of a steel factory in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest districts of the Haitian capital. A United Nations film crew that visited a week after the quake found doctors treating children with infected wounds, some of whom had been trapped under rubble for days and others who had been turned away elsewhere. By then the team had already performed 140 operations.
The hospital had a two-week mandate. When it closed in late January, it had treated 1,102 Haitians, carried out 314 operations and delivered 16 babies, three of them by caesarean section, according to figures reported by the Jerusalem Post. Israeli civilian aid groups, including IsraAID and United Hatzalah, also sent teams to Haiti.
A model built for the worst days
Haiti was not the first or the last time. Israel's field hospital is designed to be packed into cargo planes and set up within a day or two of landing, with its own operating rooms, laboratories and maternity care. It has been sent to disasters in the Caribbean, Asia and the Middle East, often alongside the search-and-rescue teams of the Home Front Command.
In 2016 the World Health Organization, which had created a system in 2013 for grading foreign medical teams that respond to sudden disasters, classified the Israeli field hospital as a "Type 3" team, the highest level, and the first in the world to receive it. A Type 3 hospital must offer at least 40 inpatient beds and two operating rooms; the Israeli unit had 86 beds and four operating rooms. The rating means its teams can be among the first invited when a country asks for help.
Nepal, 2015
On 25 April 2015 a powerful earthquake struck Nepal. Within days two Boeing 747s carried an Israeli delegation of 122 doctors, nurses and paramedics, more than 100 other aid workers and a 260-member search-and-rescue team to Kathmandu. The field hospital opened on the morning of 29 April. On its first day it saw nearly 100 patients, and its staff delivered a baby boy.
Over the next two weeks Israeli doctors treated 1,427 patients, performed 85 operations on seriously injured Nepalis and delivered eight babies before the team flew home on 11 May. IsraAID staff arrived on 27 April, two days after the quake, to assess needs ahead of a larger relief effort in the weeks that followed.
“Natural disasters do not differentiate between peoples; they affect everyone.”Dr. Akram Amro, Palestinian health NGO director, at a joint disaster-response training with Israel's ZAKA volunteers, ISRAEL21c, 2016
Turkey, 2023
When two huge earthquakes hit southern Turkey and northern Syria on 6 February 2023, Israel sent a delegation it named Olive Branches. A 150-strong Home Front Command search-and-rescue team was on its way the next morning, followed by a medical team of about 230 people, the Health Ministry and Magen David Adom. Military mapping specialists built some 300 models of about 600 damaged buildings to help rescuers decide where to dig.
In the first three days the rescuers pulled 19 people alive from the rubble: eight on the first day, the youngest of them two years old, nine more on the second and two children on the third. The field hospital, set up in an abandoned local hospital, treated more than 200 people within its first days. Civilian groups including ZAKA, United Hatzalah, SmartAID, Latet and IsraAID joined the effort, bringing food, blankets, warm clothing and water filters.
IsraAID: staying after the cameras leave
Search-and-rescue teams work against the clock. IsraAID was created for what comes next. It was founded in 2001 by Shachar Zahavi and Mully Dor as a coalition of Israeli aid and development groups and later became an independent non-governmental organisation. Its teams provide emergency relief, but they are known for staying on to rebuild: clean water and sanitation, public health, education, and mental-health support for people living with loss.
After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, IsraAID was among the first foreign aid groups on the ground, and within about a week it was working in Miyagi Prefecture. It handed out mattresses, clothing and toilets in shelters, then started a programme of psychological and post-trauma care for survivors. That programme, the Japan IsraAID Support Program, was still running ten years later and helped again after the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake.
The list of IsraAID responses reads like a map of two decades of crises: the Sri Lanka tsunami, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, refugees arriving in Greece in 2015, Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, the COVID-19 pandemic and people fleeing Ukraine through Moldova in 2022. In 2026, its 25th year, Stanford University's description of an event with IsraAID's chief executive, Yotam Polizer, said the organisation was active in 15 countries and had responded to crises in more than 65 over its history.
Why it matters
A small country has built a large habit of showing up. Doctors, engineers, paramedics and volunteers leave their families to work in tents, in rubble and in shelters, for people they have never met, in places most of them will never see again. They work beside local rescuers and international teams, and many of their programmes are designed so that local people can carry them on.
The next disaster is never far away. When it comes, the cargo planes will be loaded again, and the aid workers who stay behind will begin the slower work of helping communities heal. The babies born in those tents in Haiti are teenagers now, living proof of what that help can mean.
Sources & further reading
- Haiti / Israel hospital, United Nations (UNifeed)
- IDF closes field hospital in Haiti (Jerusalem Post), JCRC-NY
- On first day, IDF field hospital in Nepal treats nearly 100, delivers baby, The Times of Israel
- Israel Humanitarian Operations: 2015 Earthquake in Nepal, Jewish Virtual Library
- Israeli forces rescue 19 people from Turkey earthquake rubble, ISRAEL21c
- 10 years later: IsraAID's response to the Great East Japan Earthquake, American Jewish Committee
- IsraAID, Wikipedia
- Delivering Humanitarian Aid in a Contested World, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
