My brother, who still lives in NZ, points out that there are only 250 ICU beds in NZ, and I quote "Something we don't talk about much is actually a big deal reason why this country has to follow elimination strategy until we're all vaccinated.
See, there's only 250 ICU beds, give or take, in all of New Zealand. And we can't add more easily because they need trained staff which take a lot of time and money to build up.
About one in 30 COVID cases end up in hospital, and about a third of them end up in ICU. Let's say 1% of cases end up in ICU. (I got those numbers from a UPI story about US rates in March, when Delta was already spreading fast). That means that if we get to a point of thousands of cases, our ICU gets overrun. Don't forget ICU isn't lying around empty in case of COVID: they always near capacity with illness and injury of all kinds.
So a big part of this is avoiding hospital healthcare breakdown so lots of people don't die from things that *aren't* COVID. Yeah, you'd probably be fine if you got COVID. That's not the point."

The big difference is that everyone in New Zealand will follow this strict lockdown as they know that in a few days the country will be back to normal.

New Zealand is a great example of how lockdowns work - they started their first lockdown at about the same time Israel did, but enforced it more than we did and kept it up a few weeks longer than Israel did until they had zero cases. (big difference between "only a few dozen" and "Zero")

They then waited 2 more weeks with a partial lockdown to make sure that there were no more undetected cases, and then reopened the entire country, except for the border which has been completely closed.

That is how they have had only 26 deaths and kept the country open internally for the past 18 months while the rest of the world went through a Pandemic,

I am also sure that NZers are more disciplined to follow the rules and regulations so unlike Israelis.