IDF Sends Medical-Logistics Delegation To Set Up Field Hospital In Southern Turkey

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — The IDF was set to send a further delegation Wednesday morning to the stricken areas in Southern Turkey. After a 150-man search and rescue team arrived Tuesday morning and assisted in rescue efforts, the second delegation will consist of medical and logistics corps and is set to establish a field hospital to treat those injured in a devastating earthquake and smaller aftershocks that have killed thousands of people and injured over 10,000 people.

The IDF said that the new delegation will comprise about 230 people including rescue experts, military medics as well as civilian doctors, nurses and paramedics.

“The delegation will establish a field hospital and focus on providing medical treatment using advanced equipment brought in from Israel,” the IDF said in a statement.

The field hospital delegation was to be led by the commander of the Home Front Command Search and Rescue Brigade, Col. Elad Edri.

Additionally, the IDF said the delegation would assist Home Front Command search and rescue teams, which began operating in southeastern Turkey on Tuesday evening. The initial delegation had been delayed for a few hours due to broken bridges and collapsed structures blocking roads as well as harsh weather conditions in the region

Overnight Tuesday, Home Front Command teams managed to rescue a young woman and a boy trapped under rubble in separate areas in Kahramanmaraş.

“We were on our way to a damaged site, when we were called by locals who said they heard sounds coming from the rubble. We began a complicated rescue operation that lasted four and a half hours… and we got out a 23-year-old woman in good health, only with a broken pelvis,” said Maj. (Res.) Matan Schneider, the team’s commander.

In a video statement, the chief of the IDF Medical Corps, Brig. Gen. Dr. Elon Glassberg, addressed the decision to send a field hospital “amid the great disaster in Turkey.”

“This is a difficult hour for the Turkish nation, and we are proud that we can come and assist,” Glassberg said.

“The ability to send a hospital to another country is a unique ability. Few countries are able to do such a thing and we are proud to be the ones to come and help.

“We have done so in the past, we will do it this time, and we will do it like always, with professionalism, from a sense of responsibility, and with a sense of pride… we will bring pride to the State of Israel,” he added.

Many of the IDF officers present in the search and rescue teams had been at previous disaster zones in Haiti, Surfside and other locations. The Home Front Command regularly dispatches delegations to assist in natural disasters worldwide, and the field hospital has also been deployed in the past in these regions to provide humanitarian relief.