A three-year-old Iraqi child is lying in his hospital bed in Israel and smiling, after his life was saved thanks to a surgery performed by Israeli doctors.

The child, Boland, suffers from an inborn heart defect that requires intense cardiovascular effort for any small effort, as if he was running a marathon.

The level of medicine in Iraq is not advanced enough to handle the problem, prompting the international Shevet Achim foundation, which cares for sick children in Iraq and Gaza, to fly him to Israel for surgery given the Jewish state's advanced capabilities in the field.

The child arrived in Israel with his mother about a month and a half ago, and was hospitalized in Safra Hospital for Children at the Sheba medical center near Tel Aviv. He underwent the surgery in recent days and now feels better – he is smiling and his eyes express his gratitude.

'We love Israel'

Dr. David Mishali, who manages the center for inborn heart defects at the hospital, says that Boland would not be alive today without the surgery.

"When he arrived here, he was already at an almost irreversible condition," said the doctor, who personally operated on Boland.

The child's mother, Ranjin, is smiling too. "We love Israel and are not scared to go back home," she says. "We have good doctors in Iraq too, but the technology is not like in Israel. We had a possibility to undergo the surgery in Iran for thousands of dollars, but we are a family without such means."

Meanwhile, the Shevet Achim foundation is working at this time to bring another 30 Iraqi children to the Safra Hospital for life-saving operations.