While Canada has over 35 permanent Blood donation centres and over 4,000 mobile donor centres across the country, Israel has only one – built back in 1987.

More than 30 years after its inauguration, Israel’s current National Blood Centre has reached its maximum capacity.

The new, partially underground Blood Centre in Israel, only one of its kind in the world, will be a 5.43-acre facility in the city of Ramle, some 20 miles southeast of Tel Aviv. It will consist of six floors, an adjacent MDA logistics centre, and parking spaces for bloodmobiles, ambulances and donors. The top three floors will hold rooms for blood donations, a training centre and the facility’s administrative centre. The lower three floors, underground, will be protected by special shielding to specifications from the Home Front Command and the National Security Agency; it is here that the blood will be stored and processed.

The new centre will be protected against missile attacks, biological and chemical attacks, and natural disasters (Israel rests on two active seismic fault lines and is most susceptible to earthquakes). It will have enough space to accommodate the latest technologies both for processing blood and for keeping the site safe from cyber-attacks. There will be a special shielded storage space for a strategic supply of blood in case of emergency.

The facility will be able to produce 500,000 units of blood annually, which will meet the World Health Organization (WHO) target taking into account population growth. It will be able to produce and process 2,200 blood units daily (up to 3,500 units in an emergency situation), compared to the current 1,100 units produced daily.