Treating their wounded friend in the living room

A memory etched in all MDA Sderot staffers: having to treat their friend Hananel Jerafi, an EMT and a volunteer ambulance driver. Early that Saturday morning, he responded to an emergency call with his friend Elisaf Bar Haim.

While driving around Sderot, they encountered a terrorists’ van. The terrorists saw that it was an ambulance and nevertheless fired at them. Hananel, the driver, was shot in the back and seriously wounded. Despite his injury, he continued to drive a few hundred yards, and only then did his friend Elisaf take his place at the wheel. Everyone heard the chilling report about Hananel’s injury over the MDA radio network. Realizing that he will not be able to take his wounded friend to the hospital because the terrorists were still all over the city, in an instant he decided to evacuate him to the house of the paramedic Aviv Shneur, who had been their instructor in the EMT course.

Aviv recalls: “When the sirens started, I realized that today I will have to wear a uniform rather than festive clothes for Simchat Torah, and that I will have to go to the Station and not to the synagogue. I was getting ready to leave when suddenly I got a call from the MDA Lachish call center, and I was told something incomprehensible: ‘An ambulance is on its way to your house with someone who has a gunshot wound. They shot at the ambulance, they’re shooting at the Station, they’re shooting everywhere.’ At first, I didn’t understand the report. They quickly explained to me what happened. There was no time to think. I was on automatic pilot. Immediately afterwards, the ambulance reached my street. I waited for it downstairs, and we took the wounded Hananel inside and started treating him in the living room. At the time, my wife Bat-El and my three daughters were in the safe room. He was seriously wounded. We treated him, we talked to him, and I kept thinking about how I could evacuate him to the hospital.”

While he was considering whether to go to the Station to get the bulletproof ambulance, Elor arrived with the bulletproof ambulance. Hananel was quickly evacuated to a meeting point from which MDA teams took him to the hospital. Hananel survived and returned home.

After everything ended, one of Aviv’s neighbors told them that while they were downstairs in the parking lot receiving the wounded Hananel, she noticed the terrorists’ van entering the street and hesitated – if she shouted, she might also draw the terrorists’ attention, and if she kept silent, Aviv and the others would not know about the danger lurking nearby. She decided not to warn them, and in hindsight it is chilling to think how vulnerable they were to danger.