“When, afterwards, I met the soldiers I treated, it made it all worthwhile”

Oren Benita is a veteran MDA staffer and a respected paramedic at the Sderot station. Meirav Benita, his wife, has been a shift officer at the MDA Lachish call center for many years. Oren, Merav and their three children live in Kibbutz Mefalsim, in the Gaza Envelope.

That Saturday, the Benita family woke up early in the morning at the sounds of a ‘Red Alert’ siren warning of incoming rockets. “It was different than usual, long and intense,” Oren recalls. “Immediately afterwards, gunfire was heard in the kibbutz and then a large explosion. I heard screams from outside, shouts for help, someone calling my name. Two soldiers with gunshot wounds were brought into my house, into my living room. My wife Merav and I started treating them right in our living room.”

For a long time, Oren and Merav treated the wounded, using MDA medical equipment they had in their possession, since they serve as emergency responders for their area on a daily basis. But the equipment was running out, and so was time. Oren understood what every MDA employee knows – that the wounded must get to an operating room in order to survive – but the kibbutz was under siege. The terrorists were still on the premises and there was constant shooting. It was impossible to leave the kibbutz or enter it. “It was a real battlefield,” Oren recalls.

MDA paramedics are accustomed to difficult and fateful decisions, but Oren had never faced such a quandary: if they would leave their house and evacuate the wounded, their lives and the lives of the wounded would be in danger. Not only might they not save them, they may even become a burden on the military forces and their friends at MDA. Difficult decision.

At a certain point, Oren decided to evacuate the wounded to the entrance of the kibbutz, with the help and cover of their fellow fighters, and from there get them out of the danger zone using an armored protected MDA ambulance. Oren recalls the scene he witnessed outside the house: “It was a horrible sight. There were many dead civilians lying around.” Only when he returned to the kibbutz did Oren have time to think about his children, who had been besieged in their safe room all this time, alone, because Mom and Dad were treating the wounded in the living room. The family was eventually evacuated, but Oren stayed. “This work is what gives me the strength to keep going, despite everything. A few weeks later, I was privileged to meet the soldiers we treated in our house. They were walking on their feet. It made it all worthwhile.”