The hospital began bringing entire departments down to a high-tech bomb shelter situated underneath the hospital, after a massive rocket barrage a day earlier killed three and injured more than 100 in the port city.
Hospital officials told the Israel Broadcast Authority's English News service that the wards being moved underground are those that face Lebanon.
The shelter was prepared when the war began on July 12th. Certain specialty departments had already been moved to the basement level, after rocket attacks in the Haifa area began to intensify.
The shelter is equipped with hundreds of beds as well as systems such as air conditioning and other technologies needed to run a hospital.
Nahariya Hospital was first among the medical centers in the north to move its patients to a reinforced underground shelter. The medical community in Kiryat Shmona recently reactivated an underground facility that had not been used since the Yom Kippur war in 1973. Other hospitals in the line of fire located south of the Galilee have also now begun to review wartime measures and consider similar transfers of its patients and equipment as well.
In Hadera, where rockets fell for the first time last week, Hillel Yaffe Hospital officials declared a Level 3 alert, under which doctors remain in close contact with the facility throughout any vacation they may take. Northern hospitals have been operating on Level 3 status for some time.
Hillel Yaffe Hospital Director Meir Oren told the Ynet news service that the decision to move the Hadera medical center to a Level 3 alert was neither sudden nor random. “When the war broke out, we made preparations in accordance with instructions from the Northern Command and Health Ministry,” he said.
The two bodies have, in the meantime, reinforced a number of basic equipment and services in the hospital, such as oxygen tanks, but have yet to extend that protection to windows at the facility.
Hadera is located halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv, just two miles east of the Mediterranean Coast.
Hospital officials told the Israel Broadcast Authority's English News service that the wards being moved underground are those that face Lebanon.
The shelter was prepared when the war began on July 12th. Certain specialty departments had already been moved to the basement level, after rocket attacks in the Haifa area began to intensify.
The shelter is equipped with hundreds of beds as well as systems such as air conditioning and other technologies needed to run a hospital.
Nahariya Hospital was first among the medical centers in the north to move its patients to a reinforced underground shelter. The medical community in Kiryat Shmona recently reactivated an underground facility that had not been used since the Yom Kippur war in 1973. Other hospitals in the line of fire located south of the Galilee have also now begun to review wartime measures and consider similar transfers of its patients and equipment as well.
In Hadera, where rockets fell for the first time last week, Hillel Yaffe Hospital officials declared a Level 3 alert, under which doctors remain in close contact with the facility throughout any vacation they may take. Northern hospitals have been operating on Level 3 status for some time.
Hillel Yaffe Hospital Director Meir Oren told the Ynet news service that the decision to move the Hadera medical center to a Level 3 alert was neither sudden nor random. “When the war broke out, we made preparations in accordance with instructions from the Northern Command and Health Ministry,” he said.
The two bodies have, in the meantime, reinforced a number of basic equipment and services in the hospital, such as oxygen tanks, but have yet to extend that protection to windows at the facility.
Hadera is located halfway between Haifa and Tel Aviv, just two miles east of the Mediterranean Coast.