Hundreds from all walks of life stand in line for up to 11 hours at Jerusalem’s Pais Arena in order to donate for devastated nation after Hamas bloodbath.
It was 10:30 a.m. on Monday and the line of blood donors snaked up the wide staircase and around the spacious sidewalks surrounding Jerusalem’s Pais Arena stadium, just half an hour after the doors opened for the Magen David Adom blood drive.
Jerusalemites of all stripes — secular teens toting guitars and yeshiva boys with prayer books in hand, groups of worried mothers, English speakers, Russian and French immigrants, Christian pilgrims — all waited for hours, quietly and patiently, in order to donate blood.
Bursting across the border on Saturday morning, hundreds of Hamas terrorists massacred over 900 Israelis, including hundreds of civilians, and injured thousands more. There were some 2,300 injured patients in Israeli hospitals as of Monday.
“Look outside, there’s Sephardim, Ashkenazim, all of the citizens of Israel, every kind of Israeli that exists,” said Yaakov Mohadav, director of blood donations for Magen David Adom in Jerusalem.
It was the first day that MDA was holding the blood drive at that huge venue, after the previous day turning away donors by early afternoon in a smaller location where the incoming volume had clogged the narrow street. The Arena, home to the Hapoel Jerusalem basketball team, had hosted some of the mass COVID vaccinations of 2021.
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