Beyond the strikes: how healthcare is holding Israel’s displaced together

Within minutes, the street was filled with emergency crews. Her building was no longer safe. Windows shattered. Walls exposed. Everything inside was covered in glass and dust.

Hours later, she was standing in line, waiting to be assigned a hotel room.

That is where the next stage begins.

Families arrive at the hotels with whatever they can salvage from their destroyed homes. Some are forced to leave the destroyed zone within minutes. Others return briefly to retrieve what they can – medication, documents, a laptop – before their homes are sealed.

“You just don’t know what to do,” said Garcia-Dincin, a travel agent and type 1 diabetic. The disruption is immediate. There is no routine, no clear timeline, and often no understanding of what comes next.

“We took up rooms in hotels, like guest rooms… or we just took some conference rooms, and we turned that into a clinic,” he said.

By the second day of recent evacuations, Shliom said, clinics were already functioning.

The system, he noted, is not new. Years of repeated emergencies have made this response almost automatic.

“Because of so many wars that we’ve had before, the HMO [health maintenance organization] was really prepared for this,” Shliom said. “It’s sad to say that, but it was.”

Under Israel’s National Health Insurance Law, every resident is required to be a member of one of four health funds – Clalit, Maccabi, Meuhedet, or Leumit. The system is publicly funded through taxation but is delivered through these independent providers, which maintain patients’ medical records, prescriptions, and services.

Garcia-Dincin described receiving calls from her clinic and regular messages offering prescriptions and consultations. “It’s helping… to know that they… care about you,” she said.

Doctors are not only treating illness. They are also replacing medication, arranging care, and managing patients who don’t have access to their regular services.

In the first days of displacement, when people first arrive, they don’t need complex treatment – they need immediate, practical basics.

“They don’t have their medications… their hearing aids… their eyeglasses,” said Dr. Ishai Lev, a family medicine specialist working with evacuees.

Chronic conditions destabilize quickly. Blood pressure spikes. Diabetes becomes harder to manage. Older patients arrive confused, disoriented, and without access to routine care.

“What they needed is someone to hear them… just to give them normality,” he said.

Shliom echoed this sentiment. “They would come… for medical needs, for social needs, for bureaucratic needs, for a shoulder,” he said.

Patients arrive with headaches, stomach pain, and fatigue. The symptoms are real, but not always physical.

“There’s a lot of somatization,” Shliom said – physical symptoms reflecting emotional distress.

Anxiety surfaces indirectly. A patient may describe fear and, in the same breath, a severe headache, without connecting the two.

In many cases, the boundary between medical care and emotional support disappears.

The deeper challenge is not the immediate disruption but the absence of routine that follows.

“What they need is structure,” Shliom said. Displacement strips away the systems that organize daily life – work, school, community, even simple habits. Hotels, he added, work against that need.

“It seems like sort of a temporary paradise, but it’s not really paradise,” he noted.

At first, the environment can feel like an escape, a vacation of sorts.

“I was like, yes, the room is great… everything is okay,” Garcia-Dincin said.

Within days, that perspective shifts. There is no privacy. No stable routine. The room is shared. The lobby is crowded. Work becomes difficult, sometimes impossible. “It was impossible to try to set a daily routine,” she said.

Healthcare systems attempt to fill that gap. Clinics become fixed points – places with schedules, staff, and predictable processes.

“They become an anchor,” Shliom said, describing clinics as one of the few stable structures available to evacuees.

Around them, other services follow: temporary kindergartens, mental health support, and community programming. But the environment remains inherently unstable.

For children, the impact is more immediate.

Children lose not only their homes but also their sense of stability. Play reflects the disruption – games about alarms, running, and hiding.

Many regress to earlier behaviors: bedwetting, separation anxiety, and increased sensitivity to noise.

The work, she said, often focuses on the parents. “You’re the secure base,” she tells them.

Without a physical home, stability becomes relational – something children find in their caregivers rather than in their environment.

For Garcia-Dincin, the support is visible – in phone calls, access to medication, and the presence of systems working around her.

But it exists alongside uncertainty. She is still in the hotel. Still without a clear timeline. Still waiting to return home.

Around her, the system continues to function – rebuilding care in temporary spaces, restoring fragments of routine, holding together what has been disrupted.

But the conditions it is responding to remain unresolved. “What they need,” Lev said, “is to feel that they can take their life back.”

For now, that process has begun – not at home but in the spaces in between.■