MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
In Israel these days, you might see young men in their 20s walking on the streets with amputated legs or serious wounds from fighting in Gaza. That is surprising. In past wars, Israeli soldiers often did not survive those kinds of serious injuries, which prompts a question, what's saving their lives this time? NPR's Daniel Estrin reports from Tel Aviv.
DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: At an Israeli military base, IDF soldiers present new technology being used to treat wounded soldiers in Gaza.
IDO: My name is Ido. I'm an officer. I'm captain in the IDF. This is the Thor UAV.
ESTRIN: He holds up an Israeli-made drone. It can drop bombs and also parachute units of blood from the sky, factoring in the wind condition to reach wounded soldiers in Gaza.
IDO: The drone - it reaches above them. It predicts with the wind direction where the parachute is going to go.
ESTRIN: In past fighting, Israeli combat medics treated wounded soldiers with freeze-dried plasma, but they've now developed technology to get whole blood stored at the right temperature to the battlefield quickly, says an army biomedical engineer.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: The difference between providing freeze-dried plasma and giving whole blood to a severely hemorrhaging victim is incredibly different, and the whole blood saved a lot of lives.
ESTRIN: The soldiers in this story only gave their first name or no name at all. It's part of a new military protocol aimed at protecting them from potential war crimes prosecution around the world for their role in the Gaza war. Here's another Israeli-made device newly deployed in Gaza.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINE WHIRRING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: This is the breathing circuit.
ESTRIN: It's a portable device that separates oxygen from the air and uses it to ventilate wounded soldiers without using pressurized oxygen cylinders that aren't as safe on the battlefield. Dr. Todd Rasmussen at the Mayo Clinic is a leading expert on how armies treat soldier casualties.
TODD RASMUSSEN: There is a lot of new innovation. We know that getting blood into patients who have lost blood as fast as possible is good to save life and limb. That was learned during the Second World War. But delivering that blood to medics by drones, that's very new.
ESTRIN: Today, physicians treating soldiers in Israel and in Ukraine are sharing their experiences with surgeons in the U.S.
RASMUSSEN: This strange sort of silver lining of the dark cloud of war is that a lot of these experiences and technologies or methodologies do get translated to the care of civilians.
ESTRIN: His team at the Mayo Clinic has been in touch with a surgeon in an Israeli civilian hospital, Dr. Galit Sivak at Rabin Medical Center. She's been sharing the method she's used to save the limbs of 35 Israeli soldiers in the Gaza war, like one soldier named Nevo.
GALIT SIVAK: He was badly wounded, OK? He's a good example. He had a lung injury. His teeth were - you know, he lost his teeth. And his leg was - it was really badly mangled extremity.
ESTRIN: She says she ditched the usual protocol of damage control.
SIVAK: It's written in the books that leave the leg alone. And when his lungs are better, then you can deal with the leg. But the leg is not going to wait for you. It's not going to wait.
ESTRIN: Dr. Sivak managed to save the leg. She also treated badly wounded Palestinians detained by the Israeli military on suspicion of being militants. But since the war began, Israeli hospitals no longer treat Palestinian civilians wounded in Gaza. The health care system in Gaza has been devastated by Israeli attacks. The U.N. says Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.
NEVO: (Speaking Hebrew).
ESTRIN: We traveled to a Kibbutz near the Gaza border to meet Nevo, the 25-year-old Israeli soldier whose leg was saved by Dr. Sivak. Big sections of his leg muscles are missing - left behind in Gaza from the blast that injured him. But he can do his CrossFit training. He can ride a bike. After we met him, he left for travels in Asia. But his mind often drifts to that moment in Gaza when Palestinian militants detonated explosives in a home, wounding him and killing two close friends in his army unit. He often thinks, could the unit have acted differently so they'd be alive today?
NEVO: Always in your mind - you always think about them. We think about what we did wrong, what we did right, and we learn from it, but I cannot go back.
ESTRIN: More Israeli soldiers' lives have been saved in this war thanks to medical advances and lessons learned on the operating table. But those soldiers will carry scars, some invisible, for the rest of their lives. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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