The entrance hall of the Galilee Medical Center in northern Israel is mostly empty and quiet. The roar of fighter jets and intermittent thunder of artillery replaced the sounds of doctors, orderlies and patients at this large hospital closest to the border with Lebanon.
Almost all hospital staff and patients went into hiding.
Today, getting to the hospital’s nerve center requires climbing through 15-foot concrete barricades and multiple blast doors, then descending several floors into a labyrinthine underground complex.
This is where thousands of patients and hospital staff have been for the past six months as strikes intensify between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, the powerful Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, just six miles north.
The underground operation at the Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya is one of the most striking examples of how life in northern Israel has been upended since Hezbollah began launching near-daily attacks against the army. in October in solidarity with Hamas, the Iran-backed group that carried out the attack on southern Israel that month.
Cross-border fire incited tens of thousands of people Israelis will evacuate towns and villages and schools and forced factories and businesses to close their doors. On the Lebanese side of the border, tens of thousands more have fled their homes.
The hospital had been preparing for such a scenario for years, given its proximity to one of the region’s most volatile borders.
“We knew this moment would come, we just didn’t know when,” Dr. Masad Barhoum, the hospital’s chief executive, said in an interview last week.
Hours after the Hamas attack on October 7, staff members at the Galilee Medical Center feared that Hezbollah might launch a similar attack. Even before the government issued evacuation orders, hospital leaders decided to move most of the vast complex into an underground emergency annex. They reduced the 775-bed hospital to 30 percent of its capacity in case it needed to suddenly take in waves of new trauma patients.
“It is our duty to protect the people here,” said Dr. Barhoum. “This is what I’ve been preparing for my whole life.”
The hospital’s imposing internal medicine department is now empty, its wide, neon-lit corridors plunged into silence. In the department’s current basement location, the whir of hospital machinery mixes with the beeps of golf carts carrying supplies through narrow tunnels that open into the hospital parking lot, offering the only hint of Sun.
Patients lie in beds separated by movable curtain rods in a maze of corridors. Visitors sit on plastic chairs in a makeshift waiting room because the space is too crowded to allow everyone to get to the patient’s bedside. Tubes and wires running across the ceiling give the space the feel of an engine room.
In the neonatal intensive care unit, new parents in protective gowns gather to bottle-feed their babies in a dimly lit room. Doctors perform an operation on another small patient a few meters away.
The neonatal unit was the first to be moved underground on Oct. 7, said Dr. Vered Fleisher Sheffer, director of the unit.
“Even though everyone feels safer here,” she said, “it’s a challenge because we’re humans and now we have to stay underground.”
His unit also went underground in 2006, during the last all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah: Dr. Fleisher Sheffer remembers traveling to the hospital on deserted roads as air-warning sirens blared. One day, a rocket hit the ophthalmology department, but the patients had already been moved, hospital officials said.
This war lasted a little over a month and the threat from Hezbollah became less felt in the years that followed. October 7 changed that.
The day before the New York Times journalists visited the hospital, Hezbollah strike hits neighboring Bedouin village, injuring 17 soldiers and two civilians. The injured were taken to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where one of the soldiers died on Sunday.
“They are our neighbors,” said Dr. Fleisher Sheffer, referring to Hezbollah militants. “It’s not like they’re going anywhere, and neither are we.”
