Despite recent friction and heightened security tensions between Israel and Syria, a Syrian toddler entered Israel with her mother on Tuesday morning to undergo life-saving heart surgery.
While Israel and Syria are enemies, the Jewish state has not been indifferent to the dire humanitarian situation in the war-torn country to its north and since 2016 it been quietly maintaining Operation Good Neighbor, a massive multi-faceted humanitarian relief operation that provides aid to Syrian civilians harmed by their seven-year civil war.
This effort expanded significantly last year to include aid not only for wounded civilians but also for ill children requiring life-saving medical care.
The 18-month-old Syrian girl, identified only as M., was diagnosed with a life-threatening congenital heart defect when she was 10 months old. Once she undergoes the surgery, she and her mother will stay in Israel for several weeks as doctors monitor her recovery.
About a dozen babies and children were hospitalized recently in Tel Aviv's Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer and Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital to undergo complicated heart surgeries.
The costly procedures were funded by the Shimon Peres Center for Peace and Innovation.
"This baby girl's heart defect was diagnosed when she was 10 months old and it was decided that she is eligible for surgery," said Lt. Col. Dr. Sergei Kotikov, Operation Good Neighbor's chief physician.
"These are defects that you hardly ever encounter in Israel at these ages. In Syria, children ages 5, 7 and 11 go undiagnosed and walk around with life-threatening conditions. Our resources are limited and deciding who is eligible for such surgeries is a great dilemma.
"The children understand that we are not trying to hurt them. Although we are in a period of tension, we make sure entering Israel for treatment is safe for these people."
M. is being treated at the Congenital Heart Disease Unit at the Edmond and Lily Safra Children's Hospital at Sheba.
"There's already a group of about a dozen children who came to us for very complicated heart surgeries and who are returning to Syria," said Prof. Elhanan Bar-On, director of Sheba's Center for Disaster Medicine and Humanitarian Response.
"It's important for us that they receive the best care. We must remember that medical treatment is the only thing that is not political."
Hemi Peres, son of the late Shimon Peres and chairman of the Peres Center's board of directors, said he was "proud that the Peres Center is taking part in rescuing children from the Syrian war zone. We cannot sit idly by while children are being massacred. This act is part of the Jewish imperative standing before us: to be a light unto the nations and fix the world."
Rachel Basch Hadari, director of the Peres Center's Medicine, Business and Environment Department, said, "We are proud to be the only Israeli civilian body sponsoring treatment for Syrian children in hospitals in central Israel. We give them a second chance to live healthy and good lives."
