After being shot multiple times by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival in Re’im on October 7, Naama Gal hid in a garbage container playing dead. When a Magen David Adom team from Tel Aviv reached her at the entrance to Sderot, she was in critical condition. She could barely say a few words before she lost consciousness.
“Naama’s injuries were very severe,” recalls MDA paramedic Noam Waisbuch. “I looked her in the eye and said I will do everything to save her life.”
Waisbuch, along with EMT Noa Shimoni, stabilized Gal and raced her to the hospital in a mobile intensive care unit. “I didn’t take my foot off the gas pedal,” Shimoni said of the ambulance drive to the hospital, “otherwise we would have lost her along the way.”
Waisbuch alerted the MDA dispatch of the severity of Gal’s condition so that the hospital would be prepared. After leaving Gal in the hospital’s care, the MDA team returned to the field to treat more injuries and evacuate more patients to the hospital, putting themselves at risk.
After Gal was discharged from the hospital, she went home to Haifa and was eager to find the MDA team that saved her. Waisbuch and Shimoni were happy to pay Gal a visit, not in a blood-soaked war scene full of sand and smoke. Her survival became “a light in all the darkness. It is a real medical miracle,” said Waisbuch and Shimoni.
“You are my angels,” Gal told them, “I’m alive thanks to you and I am grateful to you.”
