By Avigayil Kadesh
Prof. Kobi Peleg is used to making gut-wrenching decisions. He has been called upon many times to manage Israeli relief efforts in natural disaster situations. The latest was when he led a team of Israeli soldiers bringing medical aid to the central Philippines in the wake of the massive typhoon in November 2013.
His first time was in 1988, when he agreed to be deputy director of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) field hospital set up in Armenia following a major earthquake.
In the Philippines, the IDF Medical Corps and Home Front Command operated a field hospital on Cebu Island for two weeks. Peleg worked closely with teams from the United Nations, World Health Organization, Philippines Health Ministry, Israeli Foreign Ministry and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).
“A lot of the relief we gave was more humanitarian and not specifically for injuries, as it was after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. We saw about 2,686 patients, did 60 operations, assisted 69 women in giving birth, and we did save lives, but not all of them were a direct result of the typhoon.”
For example, Peleg secured funds from the JDC to pay for removing a tumor from a two-year-old child's eye, because her parents could not afford the procedure.
"The little girl will shortly be undergoing surgery in the big city, and we hope that — as a result — one more young life will be saved for a relatively small sum," Peleg reported from the field. "This is just one of many examples."
‘I went without thinking twice’
The 148-soldier Israeli team arrived in northern Cebu under the command of Col. Ramtin Sabat, who heads the IDF Search and Rescue Unit, to find the area devastated. Houses were destroyed or missing roofs, trees were uprooted and infrastructure had collapsed. The local population of about 230,000 people was without electricity in hot, humid weather.
Bringing in generators, food, water and medical equipment, including operating theaters and X-ray machines, the Israeli team treated more than 1,700 patients in the first week alone. One local woman gratefully named her newborn son “Israel” after delivering him at the field hospital.
When patients could not be treated locally, Peleg arranged evacuation to Cebu's central hospital, about a three-hour drive away. He coordinated cases with the provincial health minister, who repeatedly said she had never seen such a caring approach to every patient as that of the Israeli medical team.
“We believe that we have to help people all over the world and to be available to help in all emergency situations no matter where they are,” says Peleg.
“When we came with our field hospital and teams to Armenia, we had no formal relationship with the USSR, and we have no formal relationship with Indonesia, where we went after the earthquake at the end of 2009. But I went without thinking twice. Would I help Palestinians? No doubt about it; for me it’s not a question.”
Peleg helped in Indonesia as part of a United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) team. He is one of four UN national emergency managers in Israel.
During his service in the IDF Medical Corps, he formulated standard operating procedures for domestic mass casualty incidents and put them in practice during the first Gulf War. After Peleg retired from the military in 2001, he became director of the Israel National Center for Trauma & Emergency Medicine Research at the Gertner Institute for Epidemiology and Health Policy Research at Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer.
His tenure there began during a period of serious terror attacks in Israel. Peleg collected all the data on mass casualty incidents into the first-ever database of its kind, which is still in use around the world.
“Even after the Boston Marathon [terror attack in 2013], the New Yorker quoted an emergency director as saying they used the Israeli National Trauma Database,” says Peleg.
He credits his wife and two grown children with supporting him in his difficult and dangerous international missions. Often he has to drop everything and run.
“When you’re dealing with mass causalities and disasters, you have to be very careful to be sensitive, on the one hand, and on the other hand, tough enough to make very, very complicated and hard decisions,” says Peleg. “What you are dealing with in these situations is who has a higher chance to survive. Sometimes you know someone died because there weren’t enough resources to treat [him]. At the end of the day, you’re tryingto save the most lives you can, and that is something you have to remember all the time.”