This is what the new hospital that opened in Beersheba looks like from the inside

Last week, a new hospital by Assuta Medical Centers opened in Beersheba. It is the first hospital to be established in the city in 70 years—the last being Soroka. The hospital will serve all health funds and provide medical services that were previously unavailable in the south.

The new hospital, established by Assuta Medical Centers at a cost of hundreds of millions of NIS and built over the past five years, covers an area of approximately 17,000 square meters. The hospital includes five advanced operating rooms featuring top-tier technological developments. The building is environmentally friendly and mostly fortified, including an underground complex. The hospital will have approximately 40 inpatient beds, including an intensive care unit.

The hospital will not include an emergency room or maternity ward. However, it will provide services in various medical fields that currently have long waiting lists: ophthalmology, urology, orthopedics, oncology, ENT, and AI-guided MRI and CT scans. For example, the hospital will be the only one in the south to offer breast MRI services, which allow for more accurate diagnostic capabilities. This will help reduce wait times for surgeries with long delays such as joint replacements, eye surgeries, HOLEP prostate surgery, phototherapy, pain clinics, and more.

Assuta Beersheba employs about 400 staff members, in addition to 200 independent physicians. The hospital will provide public healthcare services (with private standards) to members of all health funds. Assuta has established two hospitals in Israel and is working on a third in less than a decade: Assuta Ashdod, Assuta Beersheba, and next year—a new hospital by Assuta in Rishon Lezion.

Currently, there are alarming disparities in key health indicators between the south and the center—life expectancy, infant mortality, diabetes rates, childhood obesity, functional limitations, and self-assessed health status—with southern residents consistently at a disadvantage compared to those in the center. For example:

• Infant mortality: In the southern district, the infant mortality rate is 5 per 1,000 live births, compared to only 2 in the central district and 1.8 in Tel Aviv. Among the Arab population in the south, the rate jumps to 9.2 per 1,000 live births.

Alongside this, the availability of services in the southern district is very limited: there is a severe shortage of advanced medical equipment such as MRI and PET-CT (used for treating oncology patients), and wait times for specialist doctors and essential tests are significantly longer. Medical personnel: in the Tel Aviv district there are 3.5 doctors per 1,000 residents, whereas in the south the number stands at only 2.1. In the nursing field—only 3.3 nurses per 1,000 residents in the south compared to 6.2 in Tel Aviv.

“The medical teams operating at Assuta Beersheba represent the cutting edge of medical professions,” said Gidi Leshetz, CEO of Assuta, to Walla Health. “We brought here to the south leading experts in their fields from across Israel, who bring not only experience and knowledge, but also a service-oriented approach that puts the patient at the center. Every patient will feel that someone truly sees them, accompanies them, cares about them—from the first stage of diagnosis, through treatment, to recovery.

“In addition, we will operate the ‘Hand in Hand’ program at the new hospital—its purpose is to accompany patients who have been diagnosed with a suspicious clinical finding through their entire treatment process, to save them unnecessary bureaucracy, ease the recovery process, and above all, ensure peace of mind. The hospital will contain advanced technologies: robots for more precise surgeries, AI systems in CT and MRI machines that enable early detection of diseases and better diagnostics.”