jerusalem | The pair of surgeons — one Israeli, one Palestinian — examine the maze of tubes taped to 10-year-old Mohammed Salemeh’s chest. They methodically check his heart rate, oxygen levels and breathing.
The young patient’s mother, Mariam, stands behind them, next to the heart monitor. Her eyes grow wide as she watches her son’s chest slowly rise and fall.
Mohammed is unconscious after some six hours of surgery at Hadassah Hospital in Ein Kerem, but he is in “excellent condition,” the doctors assure Mariam.
The doctors operated together on Mohammed, fixing the damaged aortic valve with which he was born. A narrowing of the aortic valve opening made it difficult for blood to flow from the left ventricle to the aorta, which supplies the body with oxygenated blood.
On a piece of notebook paper, Dr. Bisher Marzouqa sketches out a diagram of the procedure for Mariam, a Palestinian Muslim who has brought her son for treatment from the West Bank city of Bethlehem. For her, the surgeons’ nationalities don’t matter.
“It makes no difference to me if they are Israeli or Palestinian. I’m just thankful to them for all their help,” she said, wearing a long embroidered gown, her head covered in a beige headscarf.
Marzouqa, a Palestinian from Bethlehem, and Dr. Eli Milgalter, an Israeli from Jerusalem, have operated on 110 Palestinian children from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who need heart surgery. Their work is funded by a Peres Center for Peace program that is supported by Italian donors.
Hadassah recently was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in part because of the cooperation and coexistence demonstrated by a staff that is both Jewish and Arab.
“Once you enter the borders of the hospital you feel you have entered a different world, far from the struggles and contradictions of the outside. Everyone here works for human life independent of anything else,” said Marzouqa, still wearing blue hospital scrubs after Mohammed’s surgery.
Hadassah’s two hospital campuses have treated more terror victims than any other medical center in the world in the four and a half years since the Palestinian intifada began, even when it has meant treating terrorists and their victims in the same room.
Hadassah also has reached out to the Palestinian community by training Palestinian doctors to open their own pediatric oncology ward in a hospital in eastern Jerusalem, and training another doctor with an eye toward creating the first pediatric intensive care unit in the West Bank city of Hebron.
On March 24, Hadassah dedicated a state-of-the-art center for emergency medicine. The staff drew on its experience to create what is considered one of the world’s most advanced centers for treating victims of terror attacks.
“Here we are about everything connected to doctors, humanity and, most importantly, patient care,” Marzouqa said. “In this way, everything else falls into place. If politics came into the picture everything would be ruined. We are apolitical, and because of this the hospital is an island of sanity.”