Four injured Syrians brought to Safed hospital

Four Syrians were brought to the Ziv Medical Center in Safed on Tuesday to be treated for injuries sustained in the bloody civil war ravaging their country.

One of the patients is a 15-year-old girl who lost her foot during the fighting, Israel Radio reported. She arrived at the hospital in the afternoon.

An 8-year-old girl and her mother, 48, were also treated, for fractures and shrapnel. Later, a 20-year-old man was brought with severe head trauma.

There are currently 10 wounded Syrians being treated at Ziv hospital, and some 100 Syrians have been brought to Israel for treatment over the last several months. According to the UN, at least 93,000 people have been killed in the bloody conflict.

Around 7,000 children under the age of 15 have been killed during Syria’s more than two-year-old conflict. Half of the 1.7 million Syrian refugees are children, and inside the war-ravaged country, more than 3 million children are in desperate need of humanitarian aid.

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon in early June confirmed for the first time that Israel is operating a field hospital on the Syrian border. He said the IDF was transferring severely wounded Syrian nationals to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Initial reports of an IDF field hospital in the Golan Heights surfaced in February.

“Our policy is to help in humanitarian cases, and to that end we are operating a field hospital along the Syrian border,” Ya’alon told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “In cases where there are badly wounded, we transfer them to Israeli hospitals. We have no intention of opening refugee camps.”

The IDF has kept secret the identity and number of Syrian nationals treated in Israel.

Syrian rebels went on the offensive in Syria’s north Monday, seizing three villages and attacking a main supply road, trying to counter government advances in recent weeks throughout the country.

Monday’s clashes near the northern city of Aleppo killed more than a dozen government soldiers, activists said. The battle came a day after forces fighting for President Bashar Assad killed dozens of rebels near Damascus.

The battles showed that more than two years after it started, the Syrian civil war appears far from over, and neither side is showing signs of fatigue.

In another rebel attack Monday, two suicide bombers from the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra blew up their cars in a military post and an army checkpoint in the town of Sukhna near the central city of Palmyra, killing and wounding large numbers of troops, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It said warplanes bombed the town after the two blasts, causing casualties among civilians.

The fighting in the northern province of Aleppo came a day after opposition fighters sustained some of their heaviest losses in months.

Government troops killed at least 75 rebels in and around the Syrian capital on Sunday, the Observatory said.

The rebel capture of the strategic village of Khan al-Assal and two smaller villages was a rare victory in recent months.

Fighting also raged in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, where the regime has been trying to oust rebels from the city center in an offensive that started in late June.