“I feel enormous pride”

October 7, the end of the night shift. A mobile intensive care team, and among them the paramedics Orian Uzeri and Ben Tataro, evacuated a patient suffering from severe shortness of breath to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon. “The shift was hard,” Ben recalls. “Suddenly we heard that there was a missile attack on Sderot as well as in the center of the country and Jerusalem. That’s very unusual. Although no siren sounded in Ashkelon, we have a lot of experience. We put on our bulletproof vests and helmets, and only then did a siren sound. The emergency room at Barzilai Hospital is a protected area, so we sat in the ambulance. I announced over the radio that we were available, and they sent me to a certain address in Ashkelon, where a rocket had fallen and seriously injured a child. We found a mother and a two-month-old baby who had been wounded. I realized that the baby had been hit in the head by shrapnel and the mother had also been hit. We provided life-saving treatment and transferred them to the hospital’s trauma room.”

On the way back from the ER to the MDA Station, the team spotted a car full of holes. They thought it had been damaged by shrapnel from the rocket, but the wounded man inside the car told them: “I was shot, I was shot.” It turned out that he had been shot at the Sha’ar Hanegev Junction and managed to escape to Ashkelon despite having been shot. The team gave him life-saving treatment and evacuated him to Barzilai Hospital. From there they continued to Zikim Junction, where they met bulletproof MDA ambulances operating in the combat zones and took victims from them, as well as other wounded people who arrived independently or in military vehicles. After administering first aid, they evacuated the wounded to Barzilai Hospital.

“At one point, the paramedics Nissim Karliker and Kobi Seltzer arrived and took control. Ben and Orian were dispatched to a house in Ashkelon that had been directly hit by a rocket. “Two people were seriously wounded, an elderly woman and her caregiver,” Ben recalls. “The truth is that the caregiver upset me the most. She was lying in a pool of blood, not understanding a word of what we were saying. I tried to speak to her in English, hoping she understood a bit or at least appreciated the attempt and felt she was in good hands. We put a tourniquet on her leg. She had shrapnel all over her body. She was really badly wounded. It was a difficult day for us too. We treated our friends, but I feel enormous pride,” Ben concludes. “From the first shot until the moment there were no ambulances left at the station, there was no need to call our people. They just came and wouldn’t go home. It was instant complete mobilization,” he says.