The carnage in Aleppo was one of the main topics of discussion when European Union leaders met Thursday in Brussels.

While EU Council President Donald Tusk last night admitted that the European Union was powerless to stop the bloodshed in the Syrian city, calling for the opening of United Nations supervised humanitarian corridors for aid and the evacuation of the city’s inhabitants, Israel continues to save the lives of wounded Syrians.

Every week, there is a bus with 50 Syrians - including women and children- who were severely injured in the conflict are evacuated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from the border with Syria to Israel.

Sincer December 2013, there have so far been 2,500 wounded Syrians treated in Israel since Israel began accepting them on humanitarian grounds three years ago, 600 of them at Safed’s Ziv Medical Center in the Galilee alone. Many are women and children.

Among them, Faris is a Syrian patient at Ziv Medical Center where he is recovering from a leg injury after stepping on an unexploded bomb in a field. He says he is a 24-year-old bean farmer from the Damascus suburb of al-Kaswe. How did Faris get to Israel? After he was injured, he said, “the guys came and brought me to the border crossing. The Israeli army was waiting there for me and took me to the hospital.”

When asked if he felt strange about entering the so-called enemy state of Israel, he responded: “The State of Israel is only the enemy in the mind of Bashar Assad. In the last five years, we’ve been on the border with Israel and nothing bad has happened from the Israeli side.”

The official line from the Israeli army is that it will treat any Syrian who requires serious medical assistance, no matter who they are. Medical assistance to Syrian civil war casualties, the IDF says, is a far-reaching humanitarian initiative.

Injured Syrians can sometimes choose between seeking treatment in Jordan or in Israel, but most choose to get treated in the “enemy” Jewish State, where they know they can get top-quality health care quickly.

The Ziv Medical Center is only 30 kilometers from the Syrian border.

Prof. Alexander Lerner, head of the Ziv Medical Center’s orthopedic department, recently explained the situation to a group of European journalists visiting Israel at the initiative of the Europe Israel Press Association (EIPA). They could meet some of the wounded Syrians and talk to them in their hospital room, like Mohammed who said he was a member of the Free Syrian Army.

‘’With this humanitarian action, we hope to find Syrians that understand that Israel is not the devil,’’ Lerner said.

Of the 600 Syrian patients treated to date at the Safed hospital, of whom 80 percent arrived with severe orthopedic trauma, only nine have died. Many return to Syria able to walk again, with orthopedic devices that can cost up to $3,000 each. Each patient costs the Israeli taxpayer about $15,000.

Others groups have also visited the hospital to learn about Israel’s medical treatment of Syrians for the past two years.

Israel continues to profess its neutrality in the Syrian civil war, and security officials credibly claim that there can be no particularly good outcome as far as Israel is concerned. Whatever Syria’s ultimate fate, more than four decades of relative tranquility are plainly over.