Tons of of Israeli troopers have been badly wounded in Gaza. This is what saved them

PETAH TIKVAH, Israel — It isn’t unusual in Israel at present for a younger man in his early 20s to be noticed on the streets with an amputated leg or severe wound.

Greater than 500 Israeli troopers have survived severe accidents combating in Gaza, in line with the navy.

Lots of them endured catastrophic wounds that may have killed or maimed them in Israel’s previous wars, Israeli fight medics and surgeons say.

What has saved their lives? Medical advances, like drones delivering blood models on the battlefield, and classes surgeons have discovered treating many troopers on the working desk.

“ If it was the last war, I would have … lived all my life with one leg and one lung,” mentioned Nevo, a 25-year-old soldier who was badly wounded in an explosion in Gaza in late 2023.

Nevo is amongst a number of dozen troopers whose limbs have been saved by an Israeli civilian surgeon who has shared her medical expertise within the warfare with prime docs on the famend Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

Nevo declined to offer his final title, or be recognized in images, in step with a brand new Israeli navy protocol in opposition to publishing the identities of troopers who served in Gaza to guard them from potential arrest overseas for alleged warfare crimes.

Drones delivering blood to the battlefield, and different advances

At an Israeli navy base in late 2024, younger troopers introduced new expertise getting used to deal with wounded troopers in Gaza.

One soldier held up an Israeli-made drone, known as Thor, which might drop bombs and likewise parachute models of blood from the sky, factoring within the wind route, to succeed in wounded troopers in Gaza.

In previous fight, Israeli fight medics handled wounded troopers with freeze-dried plasma, however the navy has now developed expertise to shortly ship complete blood, saved on the proper temperature, to a severely hemorrhaging soldier within the battlefield. Entire blood, moderately than freeze-dried plasma, is credited by the navy with saving troopers’ lives.

A conveyable system newly deployed in Gaza, developed by the Israeli navy with Israeli biomedical firm Inovytec, separates oxygen from the air to ventilate wounded troopers with out utilizing pressurized oxygen cylinders that aren’t as secure on the battlefield.

“There is a lot of new innovation,” mentioned Dr. Todd Rasmussen, a former U.S. Air Power surgeon and skilled in navy drugs, now on the Mayo Clinic. “We know that getting blood into patients who have lost blood as fast as possible is good to save life and limb. That was learned during the Second World War. But delivering that blood to medics by drones? That’s very new.”

Right this moment, physicians treating troopers in Israel and in Ukraine are sharing their experiences with surgeons within the U.S. Rasmussen calls it the “silver lining” of warfare.

“A lot of these experiences and technologies or methodologies do get translated to the care of civilians,” Rasmussen mentioned.

How one physician saved the limbs of 35 Israeli troopers

Rasmussen’s group on the Mayo Clinic has been in contact with Dr. Galit Sivak at Rabin Medical Middle in Petah Tikva, Israel.

Sivak has been sharing the tactic she’s used throughout the Gaza warfare to save lots of the limbs of 35 Israeli troopers — together with the 25-year-old soldier Nevo.

“He was badly wounded,” Sivak mentioned from her hospital workplace. “He had a lung injury … he lost his teeth. And his leg was [a] really badly mangled extremity.”

The fierce nature of floor fight within the present Gaza warfare meant extra limb accidents amongst troopers in comparison with Israel’s final floor offensive in Gaza in 2014. One benefit wounded Israeli troopers have benefited from is the proximity to the battlefield — evacuated from Gaza by helicopter inside about an hour to the working desk of a top-notch hospital in Israel.

Sivak mentioned she ditched the same old medical protocol of injury management when she obtained troopers like Nevo, who had each a leg and lung damage.

“It’s written in the books that, leave the leg alone, and when his lungs are better, then you can deal with the leg. But the leg is not going to wait for you,” Sivak mentioned.

Sivak additionally saved the limbs of a number of Palestinian suspects badly wounded in Gaza and detained by the Israeli navy. However because the warfare started, Palestinian civilians in Gaza haven’t had entry to Israel’s superior medical system. Israel now not permits Palestinian civilians wounded in Gaza to be handled at Israeli civilian hospitals.

The medical system in Gaza has been severely battered by Israeli bombardment. The United Nations says Gaza has the very best variety of youngster amputees per capita on this planet. Well being officers in Gaza say greater than 4,700 Palestinians have had limbs amputated within the almost two years of warfare.

Troopers carry scars, some invisible, for the remainder of their lives

Nevo, the soldier whose leg was saved by Dr. Sivak, frequently hears the booms of Israeli bombardment in Gaza from his dwelling on a kibbutz close to the Gaza border. Generally his home windows shake.

His leg is lacking massive chunks of muscle, left behind on the battlefield in Gaza from the explosion that wounded him. However due to his medical care, he can do his CrossFit coaching, he can experience a motorcycle, and is presently touring in Asia.

“He can do everything with the leg. Maybe it’s ugly, but it’s good,” mentioned Sivak, his surgeon.

Nonetheless, Nevo’s thoughts usually drifts to the second in Gaza when Palestinian militants detonated explosives in a house, wounding him and killing two shut buddies in his military unit. He usually thinks: Might the unit have acted otherwise so that they’d be alive at present?

“You always think about them,” Nevo mentioned. “We think about what we did wrong, what we did right … and we learn from it. But I cannot go back.”

Like many troopers who’ve served in Gaza, he now has a big tattoo on his arm with the date of his damage — one other everlasting reminder on his physique of the second that modified his life.

He is likely one of the many younger troopers carrying scars, some invisible, for the remainder of their lives.

Itay Stern contributed to this story.