Israeli trauma specialists traveled to Costa Rica in late February to train hundreds of medical professionals in emergency preparedness and mass-casualty response, as part of a major initiative launched under the Isaac Accords, a new framework aimed at strengthening ties between Israel and Latin American democracies, JNS has learned.
Modeled on the Abraham Accords between Israel and Arab states, the Isaac Accords were conceived by Argentine President Javier Milei and Argentina’s Ambassador to Israel, Axel Wahnish, and announced in conjunction with his acceptance of the 2025 Genesis Prize. The Isaac Accords seek to expand cooperation between Israel and Latin American countries in diplomacy, innovation, trade, security and culture.
“In President Milei’s honor, our foundation launched—and provided $1 million in seed funding to—American Friends of Isaac Accords (AFOIA),” said Stan Polovets, co-founder and chairman of The Genesis Prize Foundation (GPF).
The weeklong symposium, sponsored by AFOIA in cooperation with Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Embassy in Costa Rica, brought together experts from Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa and more than 200 Costa Rican doctors, nurses and emergency personnel. While Israel continues to reel from the aftershock of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, its medical infrastructure remains dedicated to exporting its expertise in the name of helping others around the world benefit from its experience and knowledge.
Held in partnership with Costa Rica’s National Children’s Hospital and the Costa Rican Social Security Fund, the program combined lectures, workshops and the first-of-its-kind, large-scale mass casualty simulation designed to improve the country’s preparedness for national emergencies.
“We must end Israel’s isolation on the world stage. Together with President Milei, we will start in Latin America and help make his dream of Isaac Accords a reality,” said Polovets. “With the advanced trauma and preparedness training in Costa Rica, we have seen firsthand the impact of Israel’s expertise in truly making the world a better place. This is just the beginning.”
Deepening ties between Jerusalem and San Jose
Israeli Ambassador to Costa Rica, Michal (Mijal) Gur-Aryeh, described the initiative as another step in the rapidly developing relationship between Jerusalem and San Jose.
“Israel and Costa Rica have enjoyed a historical and profound friendship throughout the existence of Israel and even before,” Gur-Aryeh said. “However, for me as an ambassador, this project adds another level to this cooperation.”
She said more than 4,000 Costa Ricans have received training in Israel over the years in fields ranging from medicine to agriculture and technology, but the Rambam visit represented a particularly meaningful development. “This is a huge contribution to Costa Rica’s medical system,” she said.
Fitz Haney, managing director for Latin America at GPF who leads AFOIA, said the Costa Rica initiative reflected the organization’s broader mission of building practical partnerships between Israel and Latin America.
“Through American Friends of Isaac Accords, we build bridges between Israel and Latin America that are mutually beneficial,” Haney said. “Our objective is to deepen and broaden the relationships between Israel and Latin America on economic, diplomatic, cultural and business opportunities.”
The mass casualty training is just one of many other signs of Costa Rica’s strengthened relationship with Israel.
Haney pointed to the opening of Costa Rica’s innovation office in Jerusalem as another milestone in the strengthening relationship between the two countries.
The office is expected to help Costa Rica access Israeli expertise in areas including cybersecurity, agriculture, water management and security technologies.
Costa Rica announced the initiative in December 2025 alongside the signing of a free trade agreement with Israel. According to Gur-Aryeh, relations between the countries have accelerated significantly in recent months. Costa Rica’s new president, Laura Fernández Delgado, informed Israeli President Isaac Herzog after he attended her inauguration in May 2026 that she plans to return her country’s embassy to Jerusalem.
In July 2025, Costa Rica adopted the working definition of antisemitism of the IHRA organization, Gur-Aryeh noted. “We see the relations going to another level at the moment, and this project with Rambam and AFOIA is part of that development,” she said.
Other countries in the region have recently taken similar steps toward increased relations with Israel: Ecuador and Paraguay have declared Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRGC terrorist organizations (Costa Rica has done this as well) and the Dominican Republic has done the same for Hezbollah and the IRGC. Ecuador opened an Office of Innovation with diplomatic standing in Jerusalem. Bolivia restored full diplomatic relations with Israel, and the newly elected leaders of Honduras and Chile announced plans to forge closer ties with Israel.
Milei, Israeli leaders say, has served as an example to other Latin American countries, demonstrating the benefits of increased collaboration with the Jewish state.
Sharing Israeli emergency expertise
The training program was led by experts from Rambam’s Teaching Center for Trauma, Emergency and Mass Casualty Situations, whose staff have gained extensive experience responding to terror attacks, wars and civilian emergencies in Israel.
Among the Israeli participants was Guy Caspi of Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency medical service. “We can’t teach,” Caspi said. “The only thing that we can do is actually share the knowledge that we gained during the last decades dealing with multi-casualty incidents.”
He added, “Sharing experience is actually the key to getting better. We hope that we will never need to actually use the knowledge, but unfortunately, we’re going to need to do it.”
Costa Rican medical officials said the training addressed vulnerabilities in a country that, despite having a sophisticated healthcare system, had never previously conducted a national mass casualty simulation on this scale.
Marco Vargas, chief of trauma at the National Children’s Hospital in San Jose, said the partnership with Israel has already had a life-saving impact in Costa Rica. Vargas, who trained at Rambam in Israel earlier in his career, said his Israeli medical training had already helped save hundreds of lives in Costa Rica.
“This bridge has a lot of people helping make this relationship even stronger every day,” he said. “Without this symposium, without the commitment of the embassy and the AFOIA, this couldn’t be possible.”
Gur-Aryeh said the practical training exercise represented an important leap forward for the country’s emergency preparedness.
“Costa Rica will now be much better prepared for such an eventuality,” she said. “We expect this training to save many, many lives here in the future.”
