“We saved those we could and paid our last respects to those who were murdered”

Moti Shuv, a volunteer paramedic and volunteer supervisor at the MDA Station in Ashkelon, treated the wounded under fire, and afterwards he helped collect the bodies from the terrible massacre. “That Saturday, my wife and I were at home, asleep. At around 6:20 a.m., I was woken up by the sounds of explosions. I thought to myself that maybe it’s the army training or even the enemy training, even though it seemed strange that they would be training on a Saturday. I tried to go back to sleep but a few minutes later the sirens started. They went on endlessly. Our house doesn’t have a safe room, so we went to the stairwell, and I turned on the phone. We heard rockets falling. We’re religious, so I didn’t listen to the news, but my wife, also an MDA emergency medicine technician, and I took our emergency bags, ran to the car together and waited for instructions from the call center. When we went outside, we saw a mushroom cloud in front of us from nearby. I called MDA’s call center and reported it. We went out to search the place where the rocket had hit; there were no casualties, but an apartment had caught fire. We helped put out the fire.

It was hard to reach the car and start driving. There were lots of sirens, and each time we went into a shelter or laid down on the floor to protect ourselves. Eventually, we managed to reach the MDA Station to get an ambulance. We drove to Kokhav Michael, and there we treated wounded people from Sderot and the Gaza Envelope communities. We evacuated a wounded man from Kibbutz Gevim in moderate condition, who had been hit by three bullets in the knee, thigh and calf.

Then we transported a woman in labor. Just when we were leaving the hospital, a van arrived with five bodies – two men, a woman and two children. We helped put them on the floor on a sheet, and transferred them to Pathology. This was followed by the arrival of another medical corps vehicle carrying dozens of bodies. We stayed there to help put the bodies in white sacks. I estimate that we handled about 80 bodies, together with ZAKA [the NGO that recovers and identifies bodies]”. Moti’s initiative was not unusual. MDA’s logistics teams helped remove dead people from the streets and treatment sites and bring them to designated places, first in a dignified manner to MDA stations and then to special facilities. Many bodies were brought to the MDA Stations in Sderot, Ofakim and Netivot.

Moti continues: “I have been volunteering at MDA for 20 years, since Hanukkah 2003, and have been volunteering at ZAKA for the past 17 years. Emergency medicine is almost my whole life. In addition to volunteering at MDA, I’m also a paramedic in the army reserves. I took courses where they prepare you to handle mass casualty events, to work under fire, and there is no doubt that this training helped. Every weekend I am on call with an intensive care ambulance. And if an ambulance driver comes with me to an incident, he drives and I sit in the back during the ride to the hospital. Twenty years of field experience has given me the tools to cope with new challenges. Even when you think you’ve seen everything, there’s always something you’ve never seen before, and even if it’s been a long time since you’ve done a certain procedure, experience and knowledge enable you to deal with a new situation.” “The real heroine is my wife,” Moti concludes. “Unlike me, she hasn’t seen many dead people in the past. It’s hard for her to get out of her mind the two dead children she saw, the burned woman. That’s all she saw. I saw hundreds that week. It’s hard for her. She’s the heroine here; together we took the murdered victims out of a van and placed them on a white sheet, and paid them our last respects. We are deeply grateful to all MDA volunteers for their remarkable help under fire on that Saturday.”