The city of Sakhnin in the Galilee is one of the centers of the Arab community in Israel and is famous for, among other things, the large proportion of medical professionals who were born and raised there. It is often called the “City of Doctors,” but the shoemaker’s children are going barefoot, as it were — it’s one of the cities in Israel that lacks a hospital. The nearest medical center is in Nahariya, almost 40 kilometers (25 miles) away, a medical center that like many other hospitals in the periphery of the country, suffers from a shortage of some important medical services.
A group of Arab entrepreneurs who are residents of Sakhnin, headed by businessman Mohamed Abu Younis, wish to change this situation. The entrepreneurs, together with the Tel Aviv hospital Ichilov announced the creation of a medical center, that while small, approaches the definition of a hospital for the first time in an Arab city in Israel.
