Akiva, resident of Shlomit in southern Israel, suffered direct hit on his home, yet still rushed to help the injured.
Akiva Shabbat, a member of the emergency squad in the settlement of Shlomit and a Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulance driver, participated in one of the heroic battles on the day of the Hamas attack and was involved not only in evacuating the wounded, but in trying to fight and preserve their lives.
“On Simchat Torah [October 7th] morning we woke up to a red alarm sounding through our village. We ran to the safe room and literally half a minute later heard a missile landing on our balcony. We saw that we were fine,” he recalls how that day began. “I sent the security head a message that there had been a direct hit on our house, but we were fine. About 2-3 minutes later I got a call from MDA about a fall in Naveh, a village near us.”
Shabbat left his wife and four children and responded to the call. “I got in the ambulance and drove to the site. A young Thai man was lying on the ground and we realized that we had nowhere to evacuate him to. I called MDA and we decide to move him to the synagogue in Naveh.”
By this time, Shabbat and his friends in the neighboring settlement, Pri Gan, realized that terrorists had infiltrated their communities and they need help. “Benny, our security head, received a call from the deputy security head of Pri Gan, who said that they only had two weapons. We headed over there as fast as we could to help them, thinking that we didn’t have any current incident and they did. Benny, Oz, and Boaz set off for Pri Gan. Twenty minutes later they called and they said that they had been attacked and there is a seriously injured and a moderately injured person.”
“I got into the ambulance with another friend, wearing my emergency squad vest and helmet and we drove towards Pri Gan. Two more members of our emergency squad, Aviad Cohen and Oz Glick, came behind us. On the way to Pri Gan I spoke with the MDA hotline – they said that I should not enter the village because there is active shooting – I explained that I was entering as a member of the emergency squad,” he said.
From the very first moment they encountered fire: “We drove the ambulance around the back of the village fence. We tried to get closer to our friends, who were only three houses away, but there was constant shooting. I took a weapon from someone who was in the house, reached the first wounded person, and began to treat him. This was a friend who lives in the house next to mine. Two minutes later Benny the security head arrived. We loaded the injured man into the ambulance and I took him to Naveh, while it was clear that there was nowhere to evacuate him. I drove with another ambulance to Pri Gan knowing that the roads were full of terrorists. We met the security head at the Pri Gan intersection. He brought another very seriously wounded man and two moderately wounded. We evacuated them as well.”
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