Below is the text of an email from a friend of mine, Baruch, who lives outside Acre, along with a forwarded email from someone named Jeff.

(I accessed the site and clicked on the video links but was not able to get them to play.)

Sophia
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Friends:

I don't know Jeff who wrote this email, but it is worth reading. I can tell you other news you won't see on CNN. After a direct hit by a Hizbullah rocket, 250 Arab and Jewish patients at the Mazraa Psychiatric Hospital on the northern outskirts of Acre were evacuated to Hadera and Bat Yam. Staff are working on three day 12 hour shifts. After three 12 hour work days they return to their homes and families in the north, should they wish. Our hospital has not received patients from Mazraa, but we are providing living accommodations for the staff moved to Bat Yam.

Baruch


Shalom,

I am writing this note on Monday afternoon. Yesterday was the unfortunate incident in Kfar Kana.

I am feeling a little calmer now. You should have seen me last night and this morning. It has to do with the bombing in Kfar Kara and the 48 hour "no airstrike" truce we agreed to and Condoleeza's last press conference.

It's like we Israelis are stuck in some Greek tragedy or some movie that has a sad ending with the hero dying. And no matter how many times you see it, the ending is always the same. It seems no matter who Israel is acting/fighting with on the stage, we always end up being the bad guy and the crowd hating our guts. The true villian walks off with the girl and the money. The play is cut short befiore we get to finish the job we set out to do. I mean haven't we been in this situation before, in 1996 in Lebanon. In 2002 in Jenin (the "massacre").

Have you seen the airforce clips that were aired last night? I will ask Benay, my wife, to attach them to the bottom of this mail.
They show how the Hizbolla shoot rockets from behind civilian apartment buildings and then, my friends, you watch as the truck carrying the rocket launcher drives into a car park under a house! How the heck does anyone expect us to clear out these rockets without bombing the house??? The local Lebanese population was warned by Israel to leave the area three days in advance. Some locals stayed because the couldn't afford to leave. I read that Lebanese taxis charge $1000 to go to Beirut. So someone please explain to me why these locals didn't hide in a building where there were no rockets or any ammo dumps?

This morning the reporter on Sky News asked our former foreign minister why the Israeli army didn't go house to house in Kfar Kana and confirm, room by room, just who is in that room and then determine if that person is a civilian or a combatant. For god's sake! Give me a break! Kiryat Shemona was shot with 100 (one hundred) rockets in less than 1 hour yesterday. Did the Hizbollah go room by room looking for civilians? If they had the chance, yes they would. They would find the kids and make sure they shot each one. I know it. You know it .We just lived through it .It was called suicide bombers.

Afula Hospital (Emek Medical Center) prepares for War.
Anyone who has toured with me knows I love maps. But I probably have never pointed out or mentioned Afula. It is a small town dead in the center of the Jezreel Valley. It's famous for "Golani Falafel" and until "Golani Falafel" is publicly traded on NASDAQ, most of you will never hear of Afula.

Last week Afula hospital was targeted by Hizbollah long range missles. How do I know it was "targeted"? 5 rockets of the 5 shot landed near Afula hospital. Take a look at one of the attached photos. There are no army bases or sensitive facilities in Afula. Hizbollah targeted the Afula hospital. Should you be surprised that Hizbolla targeted a hospital? Well, they've already targeted Ramban hospital in Haifa and hit the hospitals in Nahariya and Tsfat. So they intentionally target our hospitals and the world expects us to go room by room looking for civilians in Lebanon. But we covered this topic in the first part of this mail.


Benay volunteers in the ER of Afula hospital.
She has prepared 300 files for a mass-wounded situation.The ER is in the basement of the hopsital and it is built as one huge bomb and chemical warfare shelter. Funny how there isn't a single hospital in the Arab world that would even consider the necessity to build a hosptial in a bomb shelter. Why? Because they know we would never target a hospital.

Yesterday the hospital decided to empty out its top floors and bring all the patients down to the lower levels. Lets think what this entails. Cancel all unnecessary operations. Kickout any patient you can. Double up on bed space in the lower floors and have the staff and patients live and work in 1/3 of the space they are used to. Wards are now intermingled. Patient beds are doubled up. Have I mentioned about privacy, sanitation, confusion...

Here's a quote from the instruction sheet given by the hospital's director to the various wards:
- Dept. heads will do their utmost to lower the number of patients in their departments.
- Social Services will encourage patients to go home.
- The operating rooms will perform only cancer and emergency operations.

But how does the head of the hospital end her directive?
And here's the part that keeps me going:
"In this war we will be tested as a society, as an organization (hospital) and as individuals.
Working together, in full cooperation, we will complete the very complicated task before us:
- to clear the wards
- work in very tight suroundings
- give the best service that we can
- be prepared for a mass-wounded situation."

So what's the part that keeps me going, that makes me proud of being an Israeli and a Jew? It's the fact that Afula Hospital, that same hospital being targeted by Hizballah, is used by Arabs and Jews. It is staffed by Arabs and Jews. 17% of its Department Heads are Arabs, proportunate to their percentage in the total population. The Moslems and Christians and Druze and Circasians all work together and treat all their patients equally... and guess what? That won't change no matter how many rockets Hizbollah drops on the Afula Hospital. That's what makes us different from our enemies. Thats what's makes me proud.

So you see, we are the good guys. And we have to win.

We're all in this together,

Jeff

Go to Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs [mfa.gov.il] and click on the right column
1) IDF Video: Hizbullah missile fire from within the village of Kafr Qana
2) IDF Video: Hizbullah use of civilian shields