Israel’s Medical Breakthroughs Save Lives and Limbs of Soldiers in Gaza Conflict

In contemporary Israel, a common sight on the streets involves young men in their twenties sporting prosthetic limbs or bearing significant wounds. Over 500 Israeli soldiers have survived severe injuries during combat operations in Gaza, as per military records.

Many of these survivors endured catastrophic injuries that would have been fatal or debilitating in Israel’s previous wars. According to Israeli combat medics and surgeons, advancements in medicine such as drones delivering blood units on the battlefield and lessons learned from treating multiple soldiers during surgeries have significantly improved survival rates.

“If this were the last war, I would have lived out my life with one leg and one lung,” reflects a 25-year-old soldier named Nevo, who sustained serious injuries in an explosion in Gaza at the end of 2023.

Nevo is among several dozen soldiers whose limbs were saved due to the expertise of an Israeli civilian surgeon who has shared her knowledge with top doctors at the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Nevo chose to remain anonymous, abiding by a new military protocol aimed at protecting soldiers who served in Gaza from potential international arrest over alleged war crimes.

At an Israeli military base in late 2024, young soldiers demonstrated cutting-edge technology being utilized for the treatment of wounded soldiers in Gaza. A soldier showcased Thor, an Israeli-made drone capable of both dropping bombs and parachuting blood units from the sky, taking into account wind direction to reach wounded soldiers in Gaza effectively.

In previous combat scenarios, Israeli medics treated wounded soldiers using freeze-dried plasma. However, the military has now developed technology to rapidly deliver whole blood, maintained at optimal temperature, to a severely hemorrhaging soldier on the battlefield. Whole blood is credited with saving soldiers’ lives in comparison to freeze-dried plasma.

A newly deployed portable device in Gaza, created through collaboration between the Israeli military and biomedical company Inovytec, separates oxygen from the air to ventilate wounded soldiers without using pressurized oxygen cylinders, which are less safe on the battlefield.

“There is a significant amount of new innovation,” remarks Dr. Todd Rasmussen, a former U.S. Air Force surgeon and expert in military medicine now at the Mayo Clinic. “The concept of delivering blood to medics via drones is novel.”

Currently, physicians treating soldiers in Israel and Ukraine are sharing their experiences with surgeons in the United States. Rasmussen terms this collaboration the “silver lining” of war.

“Many of these experiences and technologies or methodologies do find application in the treatment of civilians,” Rasmussen explains.

Rasmussen’s team at the Mayo Clinic has been in contact with Dr. Galit Sivak at Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva, Israel. Sivak has been sharing the methods she employed during the Gaza war to save the limbs of 35 Israeli soldiers, including Nevo.

“He was severely injured,” Sivak recounts from her hospital office. “He had a lung injury… he lost his teeth. His leg was [a] mangled extremity.”

The intense nature of ground combat during the current Gaza war led to an increase in limb injuries among soldiers compared to Israel’s last ground offensive in Gaza in 2014. One advantage wounded Israeli soldiers have enjoyed is quick evacuation from Gaza by helicopter within approximately an hour to a top-tier Israeli hospital.

Sivak chose to deviate from standard medical protocol when treating soldiers like Nevo, who had both a leg and lung injury. “It’s written in the books that, leave the leg alone, and once his lungs are better, then you can address the leg,” Sivak notes. “But the leg won’t wait for you.”

Sivak also saved the limbs of several Palestinian suspects severely wounded in Gaza and detained by the Israeli military. However, since the war began, Palestinians civilians in Gaza have not had access to Israel’s advanced medical system. Israel no longer permits Palestinian civilians wounded in Gaza to be treated at Israeli civilian hospitals.

The medical system in Gaza has been severely damaged by Israeli bombardment. The United Nations reports that Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita worldwide. Health officials in Gaza state that over 4,700 Palestinians have had limbs amputated since the conflict began nearly two years ago.

Nevo, whose leg was saved by Dr. Sivak, often hears the sounds of Israeli bombardment in Gaza from his home on a kibbutz near the border. His windows occasionally shake.

His leg is missing large chunks of muscle due to the explosion that wounded him in Gaza. Nevertheless, thanks to his medical care, he can engage in CrossFit training, ride a bike, and is currently traveling in Asia.

“He can do everything with the leg,” says Sivak, his surgeon. “It might be ugly, but it’s functional.”

Despite this, Nevo often reflects on the moment in Gaza when Palestinian militants detonated explosives in a house, wounding him and killing two close friends in his army unit. He frequently wonders: Could the unit have acted differently to ensure they would still be alive today?

“You always think about them,” Nevo muses. “We consider what we did wrong, what we did right…and learn from it. But I cannot go back.”

Like many soldiers who have served in Gaza, he now has a large tattoo on his arm commemorating the date of his injury – another permanent reminder of the event that changed his life.

He is one of the many young soldiers carrying physical and emotional scars for the rest of their lives.