“We make up the medicine for captivity”

When the first hostages were released by Hamas to Gaza, taken to Israel and transferred with a helicopter to Rabin Medical Center in Petach Pumpkin, Michal Steinman will take them to the sixth floor, open the finger on the glass door and sees them again with their worst family after more than 700 days in the sore.

“It’s a privilege,” says nurses head. “These are the moments when I’m 70 or 80, these are the two or three moments that I will remember. They symbolize so many values ​​- as a nurse as a mother, as a woman as Israeli.”

Twenty hostages must be published under the terms of the Agreement between Israel and Hamas. Several of them will be brought to this hospital.

It will be the third time the hostage department has worked. The BBC visits the unit on Saturday when the medical team learned the identity of the hostages to be treated.

“There is no such area as a captivity medicine and we invent it,” Dr. Steinman told the BBC on Saturday after the team learned the identity of the hostages to be treated.

Employees have learned two major lessons from the two previous hostage versions in November 2023 and January this year, she says.

The first is to be a “medical detective”, to try to understand what happened in those long days and nights of captivity.

With earlier, often enchanted, chained, beaten hostages, “they had things in their blood examinations, in their enzymes that we could not understand.”

They have also learned that the symptoms may not be for days or weeks.

“The captivity makes things on your body that your body remembers. You see all these layers. It takes time to see what happened to their bodies, with their souls,” she said.

“We are still taking care of the hostages who returned in January and February and we find new things every week.”

The other lesson is to take the time. There are a huge number of professionals from different disciplines: nutritionists, social workers, mental health professionals, along with the full panorama of medical staff.

But there is also a “Don’t Disturb” card at the door of the private room of each hostage. The respondents of the hotel are deliberate, as are the care packs and soft furnishings and soft lighting to go with the hospital bed and monitors. There is an extra single bed made up for those hostages who do not want to be left alone overnight so that a partner or relative sleeps with them. Their closest family will also have their own bedroom directly through the hostage corridor.

“You know that medical people are tasks oriented. There is a schedule,” says Dr. Steinman. “You have to give them a lot more space here. You have to decide what is urgent and what it can wait for two days. You must be humble and flexible without leaving your medical responsibility.”

Among these responsibilities is the determination of what the hostages, some of whom may have lost more than half of their body weight in captivity, eat and how fast.

Their physical recovery is only part of history. Karina Schwartz is the director of social work at the Rabin Medical Center. She is another key member of the team, with responsibility not only for the hostages, but also for their closest relatives. They need to learn their own delicate calibration of family dynamics – when to talk and when not, she says.

“The most important thing is what we don’t say,” she says. “Because if we sit in the room and someone tells us something very difficult about how they almost died captive, and we are silent: it is a very strong silence.”

But at the same time you need to restrain yourself. “We can’t talk about two years a week. Complexes need space and time. They also need silence. We have to listen. To listen to their story.”

The staff in the hostage department emphasizes that their work does not end when the hostages return home. Medical and psychological rehabilitation will continue and the hostages must also be prepared, says G -Ja Schwartz for the moment “when the real world comes.”

The message she and her team are trying to break into the hostages and their families is that everyone will want to see them. For two years they have been public figures.

“Everyone will want to be friends. We say to them: It’s good to say no. It is safe to say no.

So far, the nervous expectation among the staff is tangible.

“You need to see my messages on WhatsApp,” says Dr. Steinman, a lot of Israeli breastfeeding director with nasal piercing and multiple tattoos.

Almost every one of her 1,700 nurses in the medical complex, there are, according to her, voluntarily made additional changes to the unit.

“You win hope again,” she says. “Working here, you realize that life and people are good. You are aware of the power of the human spirit.”

Yet, according to her, it will be the job to end this job.

“This is the third time we open the unit. To know that this is the last time: that when we close this place and say that the mission is fulfilled. Then we will know that the nightmare is over.”