This Israeli Doctor Survived October 7; He Spent a Lifetime Helping Israelis and Palestinians

Ron Lobel spent his career at the Barzilai Medical Center in Israel. After narrowly escaping the tragedy that befell many Israelis on October 7th, he volunteered to treat victims of the Gaza war.

What makes the situation even more personal for Dr. Lobel is that he trained Palestinian doctors until 2008, and helped in Gaza between 1988 and 1994, where he oversaw the building of an ICU at a hospital in Khan Younis.

Lobel’s home in Netiv Ha’Asara is 300 meters from the Gaza border. Lobel usually rushes to the hospital when he hears attacks near the border — which happen sporadically when one lives in the vicinity of the Strip.

But on the fateful day of October 7, his wife stopped him from getting into his car and driving towards the hospital .

“That saved my life,” he said.

Lobel and his wife stayed inside their bomb shelter throughout the ordeal.

“I had no time to be afraid, “ he exclaimed. “I had to save lives [even on the telephone].”

Miraculously, Hamas terrorists did not enter his dwelling, and he waited inside for 13 hours — helping the hospital by coordinating with them over the phone.

It was a very “intense ordeal,” he said. Many of his close friends died in the Hamas massacre.

Lobel grew up in Tel Aviv, and finished his medical studies at the University of Bologna in 1979. He then returned to Israel, and began working at Barzilai. Today he is officially retired, but stays on as a consultant.

Being the child of Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia and Romania, Lobel notes that Israel was built by people who came to a new nation with a lot of trauma.

“There is something called post-traumatic breakdown, but there is also post-traumatic growth, and Israel is a symbol of this,” he said.

During his many years in the profession, Lobel trained many Palestinian doctors — including in Gaza, until the mid 200s. Since then, he has trained doctors from the West Bank.

He told me that one of the biggest highlights of his career was the Ethiopian aliyah, where some of the new Olim came with severe medical problems.

He said that many of those he saved have now made good lives for themselves in Israel, and that some of those young Ethiopian Jews became doctors themselves, treating others and carrying forth the spirit of helping that Lobel believes in so strongly.

Lobel says there are many doctors of Arab descent in Israel, and believes that the proportion is much higher than Israel ever gets credit for.

Lobel is also known for taking care of a prayer site on the hospital grounds that was once the resting place for Husayn ibn Ali, grandson and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Mohammed. Lobel shows Muslim pilgrims from around the world the holy site, and he said that members of the Bohra group, a Shia Muslim sect who mostly live in India, especially like to visit.

The original mosque on the site was destroyed in the 1948 War of Independence. It remained forgotten for a while. But in 1980, a Bohra group from Egypt visited the site and after much petitioning by their religious chief, a new site was erected within the hospital premises.

In 2020, the site was damaged by vandals, but the Bohra community in India paid for its restoration. Lobel appreciated how the architects incorporated the Star of David into the Islamic architecture.

Lobel said that the hospital has treated several patients of the various wars with Hamas in Gaza over the years, including the current one.

After his decades of experience in Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, he still believes that co-existence is the path to peace, and hopes that a day will finally come when the wars will finally end.

Avi Kumar is a Holocaust historian/journalist from Sri Lanka. He has lived in many countries and speaks 11 languages. He has written about a variety of topics in publications worldwide. 

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