""Every day there are aerial bombings of cities. Each city is bombed three or four times by fighter planes," Firas, who defected from Assad's army to join the rebels fighting to topple him, said.

"Bashar [Assad] didn't take care of us. Here, in Israel, we are being taken care of. Bashar doesn't care about us, whereas Israel does. Bashar fires shells at us, he doesn't care about us at all."

Another patient, Latif, said, "They taught us about the Zionist enemy, the Zionist oppressor. But when we saw the Zionists, [we realized] they were nothing like what we'd been told. They're human beings just like us, human, and even more than that."

Read more: IDF allows first peek into secret Golan Heights field hospital | The Times of Israel