Dozens of folded screens occupy two parking spaces. A little further on, plastic-wrapped equipment – bedside tables, chairs, wheeled cabinets – has been relegated to other locations. Nearby, in the underground command post that once housed the management and department heads, the six screens – from which you could watch a national news channel as well as rocket launches from cameras set up along the border with Lebanon – have been switched off. Housed three floors underground in its gigantic 20,000-square-meter parking lot, the Rambam Hospital in Haifa, northern Israel, has emerged from underground.

For three months, the services of the university health center, the largest in northern Israel, transferred all their patients here, including delivery rooms and intensive care units. The order had not been given when Hezbollah rockets began raining down on this part of the territory, in the aftermath of the bloody October 7, 2023 attack committed by Hamas commandos in the south of the country. The move came after the explosion of thousands of pagers held by members of the Lebanese Shiite movement, which Israeli services had managed to booby-trap and then detonate in mid-September 2024, mainly in Lebanon. On September 22, the hospital went underground.

Beds in the parking lot

Babies began to be born in a parking lot that had been converted into a fortified hospital in less than 72 hours. An exceptional system, designed during the Covid-19 pandemic but never before put into practice on this scale. Each parking space number was recorded in a computerized list to correspond to... the location of a bed. More than 1000 beds were spread across the dark, vehicle-free bays.

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