From Local Healing to Regional Growth: Healthcare, Community, and Cross-Border Opportunities

This project develops a comprehensive research and planning framework to address the medical needs of the Druze population in the Golan Heights while laying the foundation for regional healthcare development that extends beyond national borders. The work is anchored in principles of spatial justice, health equity, and context-sensitive planning, while critically engaging with long-standing state policies of neglect and exclusion.
The impetus for the research stems from the Majdal Shams disaster of July 2024, when 12 children were killed by a rocket strike during the War. The absence of an effective emergency response system exposed the severe shortage of healthcare infrastructure in the Golan and highlighted the community’s reliance on hospitals in distant urban centers. At the same time, violent attacks on Druze communities in southern Syria that happened in the past several months emphasized the Golan’s role as a regional junction shaped by cultural, familial, and identity ties across Israel, Syria, and Lebanon.
The project approaches the issue through three analytical axes: place, community, and medicine. On the geopolitical level, the Golan Heights is framed as occupied territory, marked by annexation, suspended identity, and profound political fractures. The Druze population has historically navigated between Syria and Israel, striving to maintain communal stability and autonomy. Within this context, healthcare has emerged as a critical sphere of resistance, local initiative, and collective empowerment.
A critical examination of Israel’s medical planning regime reveals its reliance on an object-centered model that prioritizes large-scale medical complexes and uniform, top-down policies. While administratively efficient, this model proves insufficient in peripheral, rural, and traditional contexts. In response, the project proposes a complementary field-oriented approach, inspired by the Golan’s rural fabric and vernacular housing, positioning healthcare as an integral part of daily communal life.
The design proposal in the village of Mas’ade introduces medical–community courtyards, each clustering dedicated functions—emergency care, day hospitalization, women’s health, physiotherapy, dentistry, and mental health interwoven with physicians’ residences and communal spaces. This flexible, integrative fabric connects private life, healthcare, community, and agricultural landscape while enabling future growth.
Ultimately, the project envisions a multidimensional healthcare model- medical, spatial, cultural, and social – that extends beyond immediate medical provision. It positions architecture as a mechanism of spatial and identity rehabilitation, and as an ethical, cultural, and political practice rooted in sensitivity, partnership, and vision.