“What I saw and experienced there changed me and will stay with me forever”

Lior Levy is a paramedic from the MDA Station in Jerusalem who is married and the father of four children. He arrived that Saturday for a routine morning shift at the MDA Station in Gush Etzion. However, the team he headed was instructed to travel south and reinforce the Gaza Envelope region.

“We prepared ourselves, put on our bulletproof vests and helmets, and started driving south. On the way, we heard reports on the radio from MDA teams that were already in the south treating the wounded. Every second a report came in about the evacuation of another seriously wounded person. We began to understand the magnitude of the chaos; we began to understand where we were going, to an event different than what we are used to.”

When the team arrived in the south, they were called to treat three people who had been seriously wounded by gunfire. “We started performing lifesaving procedures on them and evacuated them to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon,” says Lior. “We finished at the hospital, cleaned the blood from the ambulance and were dispatched in the direction of Zikim Junction to treat several more wounded people in serious condition.” Lior and the team arrived at an active combat scene, “with incessant rocket fire and Kalashnikov fire. They shot at us; we heard the bullets whistling above our heads. Every minute there was a rocket, you heard a boom on one side and a boom on the other. The ambulance was hit by shrapnel. We saw horrific sights – bodies scattered on the roads, things I will never forget the rest of my life. A real battlefield. I felt like I might not survive. Between cases, I called my wife and told her to give kisses to the children and that it is possible that I will not survive.

We reached our wounded man at Zikim Junction and loaded onto the ambulance a very seriously wounded soldier with a head wound from a bullet that had penetrated his helmet. As soon as we closed the doors, they started shooting at our ambulance. We wanted to get away as quickly as possible, but he was very badly wounded, unconscious, restless, and we first had to take several procedures to save his life, and then we evacuated him to the hospital.” The team fought for the young soldier’s life, even though his chances of surviving the serious injury were not high. “Since that Saturday, I’ve been thinking about that soldier. I didn’t know what happened to him, and then I got a call from his mother. She informed me that he was alive, conscious, talking and even eating. He is expected to undergo a very long rehabilitation, but knowing that I did everything to save his life and succeeded… There is Lior before October 7, and there is Lior since then. These are two different people. What I saw and experienced that day changed me and will stay with me forever.”