“A wounded soldier in serious condition asked me to recite Shema Israel with him”

Oshrit Hadad is a paramedic at the MDA Station in Ashdod and lives in Netivot. She was a good friend of MDA paramedic Amit Mann, may God avenge her blood, who was murdered while treating the wounded in Kibbutz Be’eri. Oshrit and Amit began their careers at MDA as teen volunteers at the Netivot station, and eventually both successfully completed the demanding and challenging track and were qualified as paramedics.

The entire morning of October 7, paramedic Oshrit Hadad talked and corresponded with Amit, her best friend and colleague, with increasing concern. “I talked to her literally all day, starting in the morning. She explained the situation at her location. I tried to help her as much as possible. Unfortunately, at 2:00 p.m., she stopped answering me. I realized I had lost contact with her, and I hoped she was alive.” It was important for Oshrit to be helpful, and she decided to go to the MDA Station in Netivot to help care for the wounded. When she arrived in Netivot, Oshrit was dispatched to treat the wounded using an intensive care vehicle. “We saw a lot of bodies by the side of the road”, she recalls. “We drove towards Be’eri and there we treated the wounded. After that, in coordination with the police and the IDF, we set up an emergency care station and treated wounded from Be’eri, Sa’ad and Re’im – kibbutzim where there was a lot of fighting. We provided life-saving treatment to soldiers and civilians. We opened field stretchers and arranged them one next to the other. Next to each stretcher we placed medical supplies: a blower for ventilation, oxygen, an advanced respirator kit, bandages, tourniquets, and IV equipment. We made sure to position projectors on both sides for light. In addition, we organized another table with ‘extra’ supplies: bandages, drugs, anesthetics, ventilator equipment and more. Several soldiers guarded the site.”

Oshrit and her team treated many wounded people, knowing that they were in a race against time. “We worked very quickly, stabilized the condition of the wounded, and they were immediately evacuated to hospitals by helicopter, and sometimes also by ambulance.” All the while, they were working very close to a combat zone, with lots of explosions and shooting around them. “Until they called us from the call center and ordered us to leave immediately because there were terrorists on their way to us on motorcycles, so we folded everything, we put the wounded in an ambulance and sped off. Everyone felt they needed to ‘be there,’ everyone wanted to help out and treat the victims. We knew there were many wounded people because we were in contact with people inside. Everyone was focused; we knew we were needed so we came. We worked for 48 hours with almost no breaks. There was a very large number of casualties who needed us.”

From Saturday morning until Sunday morning, Oshrit and the team treated the wounded at the treatment site they had set up. On Sunday morning, for the first time, a patient was evacuated to Soroka Hospital in Be’er Sheva. On the way back, they stopped off at Netivot and then returned to their emergency care site at the junction. Oshrit says she worked continuously treating the wounded and did not sleep from Saturday until Tuesday evening.

All the cases they dealt with were heartbreaking, but there are two that she particularly remembers: “A soldier from a special unit was shot all over his arms and legs, came to us with tourniquets but wouldn’t let us treat him. He said, ‘Give me something just for the pain, I’m going back in there to fight.’ We finally managed to convince him, and he agreed to receive treatment. I also remember a wounded soldier in very serious condition asking me to recite ‘Shema Israel’ with him and to tell his family that he loved them, missed them and did everything to protect them. It will take time to digest everything,” Oshrit concludes, “but I want to thank everyone who was there with me. Everyone did a truly amazing job.”