Five children’s lives were saved at Schneider Children’s Medical Center over the weekend, in a pre-Purim transplant marathon.

The transplant operations – two liver transplants, two kidney transplants and a heart transplant – were carried out one after the other at the Center’s operating room complex.

The first operation took place Thursday afternoon, on a 6-year-old girl who suffered from renal failure and required a kidney transplant. In a complex operation, her mother donated her kidney to the girl. After the operation had ended, the National Center for Transplants announced that a heart, two livers and a kidney had been donated, all for children.

The Transplant Team and the Operating Rooms Team immediately went into preparation for carrying out the back-to-back transplants. On Friday morning, an operation for transplanting a liver in a 16-year-old boy began. Friday afternoon, a kidney was transplanted into a 9-year-old boy. Friday night saw a heart transplanted into a 2-year-old baby boy, and Saturday morning, an operation for transplanting a liver into a 20-month-old girl began.

Schneider Children’s Hospital is among the few children’s hospitals in the world that can carry out a large number of organ transplants at (more or less) the same time.

In order to carry out five complex transplant operations, including an operation involving an organ donated by an adult to a child, in such a short time span, a special arry of professionals is required, including the operating room team, specialist suregeons in children’s transplants, anesthesiologists, the ultrasound team, operating room nurses, ICU doctors and more.

Israeli doctors also saved the life of a seven-year-old Jordanian-Palestinian boy last wek.

The Israel Hayom daily reported on Sunday that the boy, who had suffered critical kidney failure, underwent a successful kidney transplant at the Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. His mother was the donor. The complicated procedure was not available in Jordanian hospitals.

The boy’s parents chose to have the operation at Rambam, issuing their request through Civil Administration Health Services Coordinator, Dalia Bessa, who expedited all the relevant authorizations, according to the newspaper.