A group of Israeli doctors who have put regional politics aside to save thousands of Palestinian children, as well as children from 57 other countries, by performing lifesaving heart operations was honored at the United Nations last week.
"Our activity is international, nonpolitical and nonreligious," said Dr. Sion Houri, co-founder of the Save a Child's Heart organization, based in Holon, just south of Tel Aviv.
Houris and fellow physicians Drs. Lior Sasson and Akiva Tamir on Tuesday accepted the U.N. Population Award for saving young lives, especially in war-torn and developing countries.
The nonprofit organization, funded mostly by private donors with some contributions from governments, has performed surgery on nearly 5,000 children since getting off the ground two decades ago. The patients include more than 2,000 children from the West Bank and Gaza Strip and 300 from Iraq and Syria. The rest came from Africa, South America, Europe, Asia and additional countries across the Middle East.
The organization performs the operations on a volunteer basis and does not charge patients.
Currently, 44 children are being treated at the Edith Wolfson Medical Center in Holon.
The first patients, in the 1990s, were from Ethiopia. Among them was a 15-year-old boy with a life-threatening cardiac condition who was living in the streets. After recovering, the boy returned home and eventually opened a school for homeless children. Coming full circle, he recently brought one of the students to Israel for heart surgery.
Sasson, the initiative's lead surgeon, said, "Many people might think that I'm naive, but we think treating a child with heart disease is like planting a seed of peace."
He said that even though these children have heart conditions that are treatable, "the majority of them will die before the age of 20 because of the lack of facilities and doctors" in their home countries.
Save a Child's Heart physicians are now training new teams of medical professionals to work in the West Bank, Ethiopia, Kenya, China, Romania, Moldova, and Tanzania.
