THEY ARE HOME! Rescued Hostages “Return to Life” at Sheba Medical Center

Just minutes after a series of TV and digital ads stressing the urgent need to bring home all of the Israeli hostages had been beamed to tens of millions of people during the Super Bowl on Sunday in the USA, the real life drama of actually rescuing Fernando Simon Marman and Norberto Louis Har by a phalanx of elite Israeli military forces was being played out in Rafah.

At exactly 3:14AM, an Israeli military helicopter “touched down” on Sheba Medical Center’s landing pad. Within minutes, Fernando and Norberto were whisked to the hospital’s special Emergency Room wing, where Sheba’s medical personnel were waiting with open arms and big smiles to treat them after 129 long days in the hands of Hamas terrorists.

Several of Israel’s special forces personnel who had rescued and accompanied Fernando and Norberto, were also greeted with hugs, “kol hakavod’s (job well done), bottles of water and snacks, as they spent a few quiet moments processing what they had just accomplished, before boarding the helicopter once again and returning to the battlefield.

The scenes of arriving family members several minutes later, who were finally reunited, 4 months after Fernando and Norberto were kidnapped from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, brought tears of joy to everyone in the room, including medical and IDF personnel.

As one can imagine, throngs of journalists from both the Israeli and global mass media descended upon Sheba to speak with both medical personnel and relatives of both Fernando and Norberto (see the Fox News report which aired across the USA, below).

To date, Sheba Medical Center has “returned to life”, 32 former hostages, the most of any hospital in Israel.

On a personal note, waking up at 3AM in order to race to the hospital with my hard-working colleagues in Sheba’s ‘dovrut’ (Israeli/Hebrew public relations department), is a privilege that we all hope is just one in a series of events that will see all of the hostages return in the near future.