Lapid: Field hospital shows Israel ‘didn’t stand by’ while Ukraine under attack

The over 6,000 Ukrainians treated at a field hospital that Israel set up in the war-torn country are “living witnesses to the fact that Israel did not stand by” while Ukraine was under attack, says Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.

“Relations between countries are not based only on interests but also on values,” Lapid adds during a ceremony at the Foreign Ministry honoring the staff of the Shining Star field hospital, which operated for six weeks in western Ukraine.

Lapid doesn’t mention Russia by name or condemn the invasion as he has in the past.

“We as a country have a moral obligation to stretch out our hand to Ukraine in the face of acts of butchery and cruel war crimes that are still being carried out now on their soil,” says Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, who also refrains from mentioning Russia by name.

A Ukrainian medical team from Lviv is slated to arrive in Israel in two weeks to receive training in emergency medicine, Lapid announces at the ceremony. He says that every foreign minister and foreign journalist he’s met with since then has brought up the hospital.

The hospital in Mostyska, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Lviv, operated under the name “Kohav Meir” (“Shining Star”), a pun on the name of former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who was born in Ukraine and was the founder of the Foreign Ministry’s Agency for International Development Cooperation aid program, which led the project along with Sheba Medical Center.

While in operation, the hospital treated more than 6,000 patients and delivered at least one baby. Most of those treated were not war wounded, but rather civilians who may have struggled to receive care with Ukraine’s resources stretched thin by the invasion.

“There is a question that I must often ask myself as foreign minister, and that question is: How do I want Israel to look in the world?” says Lapid. “Now I have an answer. I want it to look like you.”

“Israel was, and remains, the only country in the world that sent an entire hospital into Ukraine.”