A woman in her 20s, who had gone a week without dialysis, collapsed at a hospital in Jamaica, one of two that are functioning, and where an Israeli delegation is assisting in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa.
“We had to resuscitate her, because she didn’t have access to medicine. We had to ventilate her,” Ofer Merin, a cardiac surgeon and director-general of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, told JNS. “Thank God, we saved her life.”
Merin spoke to JNS from Jamaica, where he is co-leading a delegation of 30 Israeli medical professionals.
The category five storm, which hit the western part of the country on Oct. 28, has killed 45 people, with 15 missing, the Associated Press reported. It has displaced 30,000 households, per Jamaican officials.
About a third of the country is “devastated,” Merin told JNS.
Merin, who traveled to Haiti in 2010 and Turkey in 2023 in the aftermath of earthquakes, said that the situation in Jamaica is different. There are fewer injuries, “but the impact is probably about a million people,” who had to leave their homes, he said.
“These are areas where houses collapsed. No electricity. No hospitals. A few hospitals over there collapsed and are really out of function,” he said. “It’s not something that within days or weeks could be fixed.”
Instead of going straight to the disaster zone, as they typically do, the Israelis opted to go to the outskirts of the zone, where two functioning hospitals were overloaded with patients from the devastated area, Merin said.
Hundreds of thousands lack access to their typical community medicine due to the hurricane and showed up to the hospitals in “really critical condition,” he said.
“You really have to tailor the way you give assistance by quickly assessing and understanding what the needs are,” he said. “I think this is probably the biggest strength of our team. The ability to assess quickly, make a decision and smoothly start to work.”
The Israelis learned “very quickly” how to work “shoulder-to-shoulder with the wonderful Jamaican people,” he said. “Within a day, we gained their trust and started to work.”
Many people think about Israelis in the context of “what’s happening in Gaza,” according to Merin.
“There’s no question that we changed the way they view us, from the patients we provided care to their families to the healthcare providers to the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jamaica and the people on the streets,” he told JNS.
When the delegation displays Israeli flags openly on Jamaican streets, people have stopped and thanked them.
“People in Jamaica know that Israel is here. They give us a lot of credit,” Merin said. “We honestly changed the way they are viewing Israel, thank God.”
