AS the Syrian war ticks along well into its seventh year, I had the opportunity to meet some wounded rebel fighters last week.
These men had been horrifically injured by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and were being treated in an Israeli hospital.
You read that right: an Israeli hospital. Since February 2013, two years after the civil war broke out, Israel has been treating injured and sick Syrian fighters and children, despite being viewed as the enemy.
Australian senior paediatrician Dr Michael Harari is among the doctors at Ziv Hospital in northern Israel, located 35 kilometres from the border with Syria. In the past four years, he says the facility has treated 950 patients from the neighbouring war zone, including 121 children.
A dozen of those kids required the amputation of at least one limb. Five of them came with no family.
Dr Harari remembers one four-year-old boy orphaned after his parents were killed in the same blast that injured him. He ended up being fostered by the grandmother of a boy in the next hospital bed.
Read the full article by Caroline Marcus in RendezView at the Daily Telegraph (subscriber only).