Dr. Eyal Mizrahi, 45, a soft-spoken physician and specialist in internal medicine, has taken on the challenging role as the pioneer director of Hadassah Medical Organization’s newly opened 20,000 square foot building hospital in the southern Israeli city of Netivot.

His staff members include his colleagues from Hadassah Medical Organization’s two campuses in Jerusalem and the campus in Beit-Shemesh. The doctors and nurses rotate to Netivot, 62 miles from Jerusalem, bringing Hadassah’s world-class medicine to the 150,000 residents of the Western Negev, Netivot itself, and neighboring towns of Sderot and Ofakim. Patients will also come from the nearby kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope like Be’eri, Kfar Aza and Nirim, who were Hamas’s first line of attack on October 7, 2023.

On that terrible day, Dr. Mizrahi was there to treat the wounded, near his home in southern Israel.

“I saw the horrific scenes on the road and went into one of the military bases after a battle. As I began treating the wounded, more and more maimed patients arrived at the base with its limited facilities,” he says.

“October 7 changed my life and shifted my perspective,” he says. “Creating a medical center in the Western Negev which will serve those who were most impacted by the massacre was an imperative for me.”

“Rehabilitating the area and providing a powerful medical infrastructure that will impact all the population is the best answer to what happened here nearly three years ago.”

Dr. Mizrahi studied medicine in the southern city of Beersheba. He completed his residency in internal medicine at the Hadassah Medical Organization, mentored by eminent Internal Medicine Division head and Internal Medicine expert, Professor Arie Ben Yehuda.

Following in his mentor’s footsteps, he subsequently completed a sub-specialization in geriatrics.

“At Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, we opened a multidisciplinary geriatrics clinic, created a program of volunteers who help the hospitalized elderly, and created a home hospitalization program where complicated patients could get home care. This was one of the most important programs we led,” Dr. Mizrahi says.

Even as the war in Gaza raged, plans went forward to open a branch of Hadassah Medical Organization in Netivot. Director-General Professor Yoram Weiss tapped Dr. Mizrahi to direct it.

Says Dr. Mizrahi: “On October 7, as we bent over patient after patient from the massacre in an army base, I couldn’t have imagined that less than three years later we would be leading a dreamed-about center with advanced medicine and sophisticated imaging machines for the citizens of this outlying part of  Israel where my own family lives.”

“This infrastructure can change the whole area,” he says.

Dr. Mizrahi also hopes to set up an excellence program within the medical center for Netivot high school students to familiarize them with the world of medicine.

Fittingly, in addition to his role heading Hadassah-Helmsley Netivot, Dr. Mizrahi is completing a second residency — this one in emergency medicine.