Hezbollah rockets cause hospitals to nix procedures, schools and beaches to close

Traffic was backed up on the tree-lined street outside Elisha Hospital in Haifa Sunday morning. The congestion was the result of too many patients — not trying to enter the hospital, but rather trying to leave it.

All elective surgeries and outpatient clinics at the facility had been canceled amid rocket barrages from Lebanon, as hospitals across northern Israel were instructed to transfer their operations to facilities with extra protection from attacks.

“I was about to talk to the anesthesiologist about my hip surgery when he told me that my operation was canceled,” said Simon Hadi, who had driven in with his wife from the northern Arab town of Rameh, 50 kilometers (30 miles) away.

Some 85 rockets were launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon at the Haifa area in northern Israel on Sunday morning, following overnight launches of over 20 more at the Jezreel Valley — the terror group’s deepest rocket fire into Israel since the start of the war in Gaza in October.

A teenager was killed when he crashed his vehicle as sirens sounded in the early hours of the morning, and at least three people were injured as a result of the rocket fire.

Hadi said he and his wife had been kept up most of the night by the rocket sirens.

“Of course, we’re all afraid,” Hadi said. “Hezbollah doesn’t care who it hits.”

The attacks also caused cancellations in other hospitals, including Haifa’s Rambam and Carmel medical centers, Ziv Medical Center in Safed, the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya, HaEmek Medical Center in Afula, Tzafon Medical Center outside Tiberias, and the Italian and English hospitals in Nazareth.

At the David Yelin School in Haifa, welcome signs were still up for first graders who started school three weeks ago, but the school was shuttered after the Home Front Command instructed all educational institutions in the area to be closed on Sunday and Monday.

“If this happens occasionally, that’s okay,” said Roza Mayer, whose two children attend Regba Elementary School, near Nahariya. “But I missed a workday to be with them, and I can’t keep doing that.”

Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war against Hamas there.

So far, the skirmishes have resulted in 26 civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of 22 IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria without any injuries.

The IDF Home Front Command placed restrictions on public activities in northern Israel Saturday night in expectation of Hezbollah attacks, and on Sunday morning announced that schools would be closed in the Golan Heights, Galilee, Haifa bay area, and northern valleys.

The escalation comes after last week’s pager and walkie-talkie blasts in Lebanon, which killed more than 30 members of the terror group and wounded thousands of others. The attack was attributed to Israel, which has not commented. It also follows Israel’s assassination on Friday of top Hezbollah commanders Ibrahim Aqil and Ahmed Wahbi, along with other senior members of the group, in an airstrike on a residential building in Beirut, where the terror group leaders had gathered for a meeting in an underground room.

“This has been our life for the past 11 months,” said Tova Shababo, a resident of Safed, who had come to the Haifa hospital with two of her sons.

She and one of her boys had picked up the other son in Kiryat Bialik just a short time before a rocket struck nearby, causing extensive damage. The hospital had asked if her son wanted to cancel the procedure he was set to undergo, but he said no.

In Safed, she said, “stores are empty, there’s no tourism, no business, and no events.”

Hezbollah, she said, had destroyed hundreds of trees in the Birya Forest outside Safed, so “nobody is visiting.”

“Most people live in stress and worry,” Shababo said. “My blood pressure goes up every time I hear a siren.”

She said that during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, her son’s house in Safed was hit directly by a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket.

“If he hadn’t been in his bomb shelter, he would have been killed.”

Reached by phone in Boston, Dr. Dinah Kagan, CEO of the Friends of Tzafon Medical Center Association, who is attending meetings in Boston, told The Times of Israel that the hospital had been preparing for this “inevitable reality” since the first days of the war in October.

“We renovated our underground facilities so we would be ready,” Kagan said. “We continued our daily routines, but it was only a matter of time before the situation would escalate.”

She said she didn’t know if this new reality would be temporary or if the hospital would remain on emergency footing for the long term.

At Shavei Zion beach near Nahariya, lifeguards were present, but the beach was formally closed, as were all beaches from Haifa northward. PJC