Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center

Ichilov General Hospital, Lis Maternity and Women’s Hospital, Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital, and Ida Sourasky Rehabilitation Hospital form the medical center’s four constituent hospitals.[3] Together, they provide general and specialized healthcare, maternity services, pediatric care, and rehabilitation within a municipal-government institution affiliated with Tel Aviv University.[3][5] A government guide updated in January 2025 classifies Sourasky as an urban tertiary center, lists its ownership as government/municipal, and gives its approximate size as 1,500 beds.[5]

The center’s institutional overview describes a campus of about 80 dunams, with 380,000 square meters being built and more than 1,500 hospital beds.[1] It lists approximately 61 active departments and 250 specialist clinics, illustrating the range of inpatient and outpatient services concentrated in the institution.[1] The four-hospital structure also allows the center to encompass different stages of care, from childbirth and pediatric medicine to adult treatment and rehabilitation.[3]

Ichilov Hospital is listed at 6 Weizmann Street, Tel Aviv, in a hospital directory.[6] The medical center’s Medical Library is separately listed at 6 Weizman Street, with the telephone number (03) 697-4472; this listing specifically identifies the library rather than defining the boundaries or address of the entire campus.[7]

The familiar name Ichilov has continued in everyday use alongside Sourasky: in 2018 it remained common among Tel Aviv residents, patients, visitors, and hospital staff.[8] The institution’s naming also reflects different stages of its history, including the opening of Ichilov Hospital in 1961, the adoption of Sourasky Medical Center in the 1970s, and its later consolidation and university affiliation.[4]

Sha’ar Zion Hospital, opened in Jaffa in 1899 and closed about a year later, was an early predecessor of the present medical center.[4] A subsequent stage began with the laying of the cornerstone for Hadassah Hospital in Tel Aviv’s Nahalat Binyamin neighborhood in 1914; that hospital opened in 1918 and treated people wounded during the riots of 1920–1921.[4]

The cornerstone of Hadassah Balfour Hospital was laid in 1925, and the hospital opened in 1926 under the Hadassah Medical Organization.[4] In 1931, responsibility for its authority and management passed to the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality.[4] These earlier hospitals supplied the institutional foundations from which the later municipal medical center developed.[4][1]

The hospital treated people wounded when Italian aircraft bombed Tel Aviv in 1940 and during the 1948–1949 War of Independence.[4] In 1949, an internal-medicine department began operating in a German school in Sarona, at the site later associated with Yosef Serlin, or Hakirya, Maternity Hospital.[4] The maternity hospital opened in 1951.[4]

Architect Arieh Sharon worked on the planning of Ichilov during the mid-1950s, while he and Benjamin Idelson were beginning to plan Soroka Hospital.[9] The Ichilov project, designed by Sharon with others, is dated to 1954–1960 and belongs to his body of public-building work.[10] Sharon also planned other Israeli institutional buildings, including Beilinson Hospital and buildings at the Weizmann Institute.[11] Ichilov’s architectural development is represented in surviving photographs, technical drawings, and other materials concerning the planning and construction of its buildings.[12]

Ichilov Hospital opened in Tel Aviv in 1961.[4] It was named for Moshe Ichilov, then the city’s deputy mayor with responsibility for health.[8] In 1967, the municipal Hadassah hospitals came under the joint authority of the municipality and the government.[4] Hadassah Balfour Hospital was renamed Israel Rokach Hospital in March 1973; in June that year, the Friends of Ichilov Hospital Association, the Israeli government, and the municipality agreed to name the hospital the Sourasky Medical Center.[4] Sourasky was Elias Sourasky, a Jewish-Zionist businessman and philanthropist.[13]

In 1980, the finance and health ministers decided to consolidate three municipal hospitals under the name Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center.[4] The center was dedicated in April, outpatient clinics moved from the Hadar Dafna building into the new building, and the Ida Sourasky Rehabilitation Center building was dedicated.[4] Dana Children’s Hospital opened in October 1991.[4] Lis Maternity Hospital opened in July 1997, when Hakirya Hospital moved.[4]

The institution also became associated with major episodes in Israeli public life.[4][13] Haim Arlosoroff was taken to its predecessor hospital after being shot on the beach and died of his wounds three hours later.[13] Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was brought to the medical center after being shot on November 4, 1995.[13] In 1996, the trauma unit was renamed for Rabin at a ceremony attended by King Hussein of Jordan, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, and Leah Rabin.[4]

A September 2025 agreement with Tel Aviv University provided for Ichilov’s formal recognition as the university’s university hospital.[14] The agreement established shared management and oversight arrangements for teaching, research and development, and entrepreneurship, alongside plans for joint campuses and research and excellence centers.[14] The institutional timeline records a further official name change in January 2026, and current institutional pages use Tel Aviv Sourasky University Medical Center.[4]

Expansion plans have also extended beyond the existing campus.[15] In 2023, Rishon LeZion’s allocations committee approved allocating five dunams for a proposed first phase of 25,000 square meters, although the agreement still required approval by the city council.[15] The proposal included an emergency room, operating rooms, dialysis and angiography departments, and parking, followed by a possible additional phase of approximately 25,000 square meters.[15]

Sourasky’s emergency department recorded 143,300 visits in 2020, 171,000 in 2021, and 189,400 in 2022.[2] The age distribution of the 2021 visits included 16 percent by people aged 25–34 and 13 percent by those aged 35–44.[16] People aged 15–24 and 65–74 each accounted for 11 percent of visits, while the statistical categories also included children and adults aged 75 and older.[16] These figures describe visits rather than a count of distinct patients.[2][16]

A 2018 profile placed annual activity at approximately 400,000 unique patients and 1.8 million patient visits, alongside about 36,000 operations, 220,000 emergency-room visits, and 12,000 births.[8] The center’s institutional overview gives a different set of activity measures: approximately 2 million annual visits to specialist clinics, more than 12,000 births at Lis, and around 230,000 emergency visits across Ichilov, Lis, and Dana-Dwek.[1] The latter emergency figure explicitly encompasses the three named hospitals.[1]

The center serves residents of metropolitan Tel Aviv as well as people from elsewhere in Israel.[1] Descriptions of its service population have ranged from a catchment of about one million residents in 2018 to approximately four million residents of the Tel Aviv metropolitan area in its institutional overview and a 2023 profile.[8][1] Its homepage uses a population figure of one million, including people from greater Tel Aviv and visitors to the metropolis; these population descriptions should not be treated as identical measures.[17]

Patients have also included asylum seekers whose treatment the hospital financed from its own budget.[18] In 2016, those funds ran out in early August, while the remaining clinics in Tel Aviv offered only limited medical services.[18] Treatment of immigrant populations in the emergency room subsequently formed the subject of a Hebrew-language doctoral thesis comparing Sourasky and Wolfson Medical Center.[19] Sarit Shachaf received the doctorate in 2020 under the supervision of Nadav Davidovitch.[19]

The hospital has also treated patients from the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority, with an institutional figure of more than 1,000 such patients annually appearing in a published account.[20] Emergency treatment was provided to an unnamed daughter of Ismail Haniyeh, whose condition was not disclosed and who reportedly remained hospitalized in Israel for about a week.[20]

Sourasky functions as a national referral center for adult and pediatric neurosurgery, orthopedic oncology, surgical oncology, kidney-pancreas transplantation, liver transplantation, micro neurosurgery, and trauma.[21] These referral roles accompany diagnosis and treatment across a comprehensive range of health conditions.[21] The four-hospital organization places these services alongside dedicated women’s, children’s, and rehabilitation care.[3]

Recognized specialist services for rare conditions include orthopedic oncology, Huntington disease, hereditary skin diseases, a rare neurological diseases center at Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital, and care for complex mental illness attributed to sexual abuse.[22] Recognition entries include hereditary skin diseases on January 9, 2023, the Lotem Center on May 7, 2023, orthopedic oncology on August 2, 2023, and Dana-Dwek’s rare neurological diseases center on January 9, 2024.[22]

Mass-casualty treatment has repeatedly formed part of the center’s work.[4] Its history records treatment of 192 people wounded during the Gulf War in January 1991 and the establishment of a Trauma Center in 1994.[4] The same timeline records treatment of approximately 240 people wounded in Tel Aviv bus and Dizengoff Center bombings.[4]

On July 5, 2023, the chairman of the Jewish Agency and the president and chief executive of Jewish Federations of North America visited people hospitalized after the previous day’s Tel Aviv terrorist attack.[23] Their organizations delivered financial assistance to four wounded patients and their families.[23]

Among patients evacuated to Sourasky after the October 7, 2023 attack was Guy Drucker, a 25-year-old Nova music festival survivor who suffered a serious leg injury.[24] After a man rescued him from a shelter and drove him away, Drucker used the car’s seatbelt to improvise an arterial tourniquet.[24] An ambulance encountered during the escape evacuated him to the medical center, and his family eventually received a message that he was in the operating room.[24] His subsequent treatment included five more operations and seven blood transfusions before transfer to rehabilitation at Tel Hashomer Hospital.[24]

In October 2023, the center opened a protected underground emergency hospital and BeShilam, a rehabilitation hospital for people wounded in the war.[4] The Assif Center for Trauma and Post-Trauma Care followed in March 2024.[4] These openings added rehabilitation and trauma-related services to the existing emergency and surgical infrastructure.[1][4]

Earlier, preparations for COVID-19 in March 2020 required substantial reorganization.[25] The general emergency-care unit moved to the emergency cardiac unit, freeing 18 beds for an isolated coronavirus emergency ward.[25] The hospital purchased ventilators, protective equipment, and sanitization equipment costing millions of shekels, while combining or relocating wards to accommodate less severely ill patients in isolated units.[25] Dedicated COVID-19 departments opened that month.[4]

Approximately 8,750 employees are listed in the center’s institutional overview.[1] An earlier workforce count from 2013 recorded 6,000 employees, including 1,300 doctors and 2,050 nurses.[13] The center’s scale also placed it among the institutions listed ahead of Hadassah when Hadassah was described as Israel’s fourth-largest medical center using February 2020 figures; the other institutions in that comparison were Sheba and Soroka.[26]

Medical education and research have long accompanied clinical treatment.[3] Institutional descriptions identify affiliations with Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Sheinborn School of Nursing, with hundreds of basic and clinical studies conducted each year to improve understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of disease.[3] The September 2025 university agreement gave Tel Aviv University students priority for clinical placements without preventing the hospital from accepting students from other universities.[14]

The center’s overview lists 700 researchers, 57 research groups, 2,700 active clinical trials, 8,000 square meters of research infrastructure, and 200 research collaborations with health organizations worldwide.[1] A September 2025 account gives more than 11,000 students receiving clinical training annually, over 3,000 active clinical trials, 57 research laboratories, and more than 30 spin-off companies established with the center’s involvement.[14] These descriptions use different categories, notably research groups and laboratories, and reflect their respective reporting contexts.[1][14]

Innovation activity described in 2018 included Aviv Med Tech, a research-and-development company established to promote medical innovations.[8] Projects then under development included algorithms for analyzing medical data and a neonatal intensive-care model intended to identify sepsis ten hours before it presented.[8] The center’s timeline records that in March 2024 it was selected as one of six centers worldwide to conduct trials of targeted radiation therapy for cancer cells and ranked first in Ministry of Health research-performance indicators that month.[4]

In January 2020, the Health Ministry selected Ichilov through a tender to operate Israel’s first national proton-radiation cancer-therapy center.[27] The planned center was to contain two machines, serve all hospitals, and cost an estimated $50 million to $100 million, with financing from donations already raised.[27] Israeli patients requiring proton therapy had previously traveled to the United States or Europe.[27] These details describe the announced project rather than establishing its subsequent completion.[27]

Later in 2020, the center announced that it would implement Theator’s artificial-intelligence and machine-learning surgical-intelligence platform.[28] The system annotates surgical videos so clinicians can review procedures and improve surgical performance, and the planned implementation was described as the first of its kind in an Israeli hospital’s operating rooms.[28]

In April 2026, Ichilov and Amazon Web Services signed a strategic partnership to develop medical AI solutions after a three-year collaboration during which the hospital transferred all its computer systems to the cloud.[29] The resulting data infrastructure supported tools for wartime hospital operations, infection prevention in complex hospital settings, and early identification of delirium.[29] The new agreement included plans for a cloud-based data and AI platform, clinical and operational applications, and use of Ichilov as a testing and validation site for AWS health solutions.[29]

An earlier account of non-invasive kidney-stone treatment at Ichilov-Sourasky described a procedure performed at 6 p.m., followed by discharge the next morning.[30] The same account discussed an undated plan by catheterization-department head and researcher Dr. Hylton Miller to establish a $2 million research center at the hospital.[30]

The Sylvan Adams Emergency Hospital opened in July 2022, occupying 8,000 square meters with 100 inpatient emergency beds and the ability to double that number during an emergency.[31] Designed for both routine emergency care and casualty surges, it includes dedicated provision for psychiatric emergency patients and a room for people arriving after sexual assault.[31]

Its technological systems include self-registration and automated self-triage, measuring temperature, blood pressure, pulse, and blood oxygen saturation and transmitting results to the hospital computer system.[31] Mobile robots assist patients with navigation, while an application supplies updates on tests, results, and treatment.[31] The cornerstone for the new emergency medical hospital had been laid in December 2020.[4]

The Sammy Ofer Heart Building and an underground emergency hospital were dedicated in March 2011.[4] A 2018 description placed the bombproof emergency facility’s capacity at 700–1,000 beds and its construction cost at $110 million, including a $45 million donation from Sammy Ofer.[8] Arad Sharon, grandson of the original building’s architect Arieh Sharon, designed the facility.[8] Donations from Ted Arison and his daughter Shari Arison also supported expansion of the main building.[8]

Campus floor-area figures have changed across descriptions: a 2013 profile recorded 207,000 square meters, while a 2018 profile gave 250,000 square meters.[13][8] The institutional overview subsequently described 380,000 square meters being built on a campus of approximately 80 dunams.[1]

The Kisufim surgical complex opened in February 2024 with ten underground operating rooms.[4][32] Intended primarily for relatively short ambulatory procedures not requiring an overnight stay, the complex brought the reported operating-room total to 43.[32] Its rooms could also be adapted for general-anesthesia surgery or a mass-casualty event, and nearly all the center’s operating rooms were then underground or otherwise fortified against rocket and missile attacks.[32]

By May 2026, the fortified underground emergency complex was described as capable of treating more than 1,000 patients and connected directly to operating rooms and intensive care units.[33] During wartime relocations, an initial transition underground took seven hours and a second took five.[33] Patient satisfaction scores increased despite difficult conditions and limited privacy in the converted underground spaces.[33]