Samaria emergency team at work
Samaria emergency team at workShomron Liaison Office

The Shomron Regional Council's security department has begun building an upgraded Emergency Medical Center at the Gav HaHar community service center. The new Emergency Medical Center will serve the communities of Elon Moreh, Itamar, Har Bracha, Yitzhar and Kfar Tapuach and the surrounding hilltop communities for all of their emergency medical needs.

These communities are most isolated and distant from hospital emergency rooms located in Petach Tikva, Kfar Saba or Jerusalem. An average run of an ambulance from one of these locations to a hospital emergency room could take an hour and a half with no traffic congestion on the way. This distance means that residents of these communities do not have the luxury of the "golden hour," as emergency service providers call the time in which a seriously injured patient needs to receive first treatment in order to have the best chances of surviving.

The Head of the Shomron Regional Council's Ambulance Service, Aviel Mamalia, said Tuesday that this new service is simply "a life saver." He told of numerous occasions in which women from these communities gave birth on the way to hospitals because of the distance, and of children who were hurt in ordinary playtime accidents but had to be transported to hospitals in Petach Tikva for first level care.

The Gav Hahar community service center currently offers emergency services in the evening hours only. These include ambulances, fire services and social services. 

The new Emergency Medical Center for the Shomron is being built thanks to a generous donation of Mrs. Cherna Moskowitz, who realized that this center is a real need for the growing communities in the mountaintop region. With the blessing of the population that doubled in size in a very short time, came the growing responsibilities of caring for emergency situations that exist everywhere, yet are even more common in the Shomron, which has experienced more than its share of terror attacks.