Linoy Al-Ezra arrived for the morning shift at the call center that Saturday and felt as if she had entered a battlefield: “The first call I received was from someone shouting ‘Terrorists!’ I heard screaming and shooting, and then the call was disconnected. I tried to call back and there was no answer.” That call made her realize that they were dealing with a big and difficult event like no other. Linoy noticed that the call center responders around her were receiving similar calls from all over, and at the same time there were incessant rocket barrages. Everyone was on high alert. 

Then she received another call. On the other side of the line was the voice of a small child. Michael, about nine years old, called to ask for help. He told Linoy that terrorists had shot his mother and father. Linoy tried to figure out if it is possible to save the parents and asked him to try talking to his parents. Michael called “Dad? Mom?” but there was no answer. At Linoy’s request, he described their injuries and she realized that she had to do everything to save the child. Linoy instructed him to lock the door of the house and go into the safe room. “Then I heard him say ‘Amalia, come!’” Linoy understood with a broken heart that there was another little girl in the house, about six years old. She felt suffocation in her throat. But she had to save the children. She told them to close the safe room door, but they couldn’t. So Linoy instructed them to find a closet, hide in it and not leave until good people came. “When I lifted my head,” Linoy says, “I saw everyone was in the middle of similar conversations. No one moved from the chair, everyone fought to save lives.” The children, Michael and Amalia, hid in the closet for many hours until they were rescued. Their parents had been murdered. Their little sister, Abigail, was taken hostage by Hamas and was released after almost two months in Gaza.

In countless conversations, MDA personnel instructed callers to hide or even apply tourniquets to stop bleeding. Every call was recorded with great precision to provide a response as soon as possible, in spite of everything. In some cases, people called from inside their safe rooms and said they couldn’t breathe because the terrorists had set fire to their house. In such an impossible situation of total helplessness, MDA personnel instructed them to place a cloth on their nose and mouth and lie down in the lowest place, while at the same time doing their best to send help.