(CNSNews.com) – The rescue Friday of a Haitian man pulled from rubble ten days after the devastating earthquake was the latest accomplishment by Israelis who have drawn unaccustomed international praise for their small country’s fast, effective and lifesaving response to the disaster.
 
At the heart of the operation is a sophisticated emergency field hospital erected in hours near Port-au-Prince airport. The equipment and more than 100 staff, including doctors, nurses and paramedics, were dispatched in two leased 747s within 48 hours of the Jan. 12 earthquake.
 
More than 700 Haitians have been treated at the tent facility since then, and more than 200 have undergone surgery. A dozen babies have been born.
 
“I thought it would be impossible to get treatment at the hospital so fast,” IDF Home Front commander Maj. Gen. Yair Golan said during a visit to the facility Thursday. “It is a world-class achievement to establish a field hospital in such a short time.”
 
Alongside the medical work, an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) rescue team has been searching for survivors, one of a number of international units which have together extracted about 130 people alive from collapsed buildings.
 
Criss-crossing the capital in the hunt for possible survivors, the Israelis on Friday pulled a 22-year-old man, named as Emmanuel Buteau, “whole and healthy” from the ruins of a three-story building.
 
Just hours later, the United Nations and Haitian government announced an end to efforts to rescue survivors of the earthquake, attributing the difficult decision to experts’ assessment that the chances of survival now were so slim it was not worth the resources required, which could be better used elsewhere.
 
But Maj. Zohar Moshe, commander of the Israeli search and rescue team, was quoted by the IDF Sunday as saying it would continue to search for people trapped under rubble.

Equipped with specialized dogs and devices designed to detect seismic and acoustic emissions by people under debris, the Israelis are renowned for their search and rescue and recovery efforts after earthquakes in Turkey, Greece, Armenia and Mexico, and in Kenya after al-Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in 1998. (Israel offered help after the earthquake in Bam, Iran killed some 25,000 people in 2003 but Tehran rejected the offer.)
 
Also dispatched to Haiti was a team from ZAKA, a voluntary organization of mostly Orthodox Jews best known in Israel for their painstaking recovery of the remains of victims of terrorist bombings. Shortly after arriving in Port-au-Prince, ZAKA members rescued and extracted eight students from a collapsed campus building.
 
IDF members in Haiti have been providing other types of assistance too, helping residents build temporary shelters and on Saturday erecting three water towers.
 
The efforts have received widespread media coverage in Israel, where many are more used to reporting on the drawn-out conflict with the Arabs and international criticism of the Jewish state and its policies.
 
The largely positive reaction in international media has not stopped critics of Israel from questioning its motives, however, with some charging that Israel was trying to drum up positive publicity to divert attention away from the international criticism it faces over its military offensive against Hamas in Gaza last winter.
 
Critics pointed to the fact that the Israeli foreign ministry and IDF have been providing material about the Israeli efforts. The practice is standard, however; other nations involved in Haiti relief efforts – including the United States, which has by far the biggest operation underway – are also carrying information on government Web sites about their contributions while spokesmen provide regular briefings.
 
American Jewish Committee executive director David Harris, writing on his blog, disputed suggestions that Israel was acting out of self-interest.
 
“Haiti is the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere, its voting record on Israel-related issues at the U.N. is nothing to write home about, and the Jewish community on the island is infinitesimal in size,” he noted.
 
Several bizarre articles, including one reproduced on the Web site of al-Manar, the mouthpiece of the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, carried claims that Israelis’ real aim was harvest the internal organs of dead Haitians. Some were based on a clip uploaded to YouTube in which an American man warned Haitians against IDF attempts to steal their organs.

Iran’s Keyhan, whose editor is appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in an editorial Monday referred to the Israeli organ-harvesting claims, added its own about children going “missing” in Haiti, and advised Haitians being helped by the Israelis, “do not lose sight of your children and body parts.”
 
An annual report on global anti-Semitism, compiled by a coalition of Jewish groups and released in Jerusalem on Sunday, described reports linking Israelis and Jews to organ theft as a modern “blood libel.”
 
The report said anti-Semitic incidents and threats in Western Europe over the last year reached the highest level recorded since World War II, and called cooperation between Muslim and left-left groups a “central factor.”