Treating a six-year-old girl wounded by gunfire
MDA paramedic Yarin Shitrit, from the MDA Station in Jerusalem, also thought that his night shift between Friday and Saturday was coming to an end. However, after the sirens sounded at around 6:30 a.m., he was asked to head to the Gaza Envelope area in his intensive care ambulance together with MDA medic Gali-Shia Simon, to reinforce the MDA staff in the region.
Yarin and Gali’s intensive care ambulance was sent to the Ofakim area, a city that was severely stricken by terrorist infiltrations. They treated many casualties there, one after the other. However, one incident is etched in Yarin’s memory: at one point they were called to a location very close to the Gaza border. “We treated a little girl, only six years old, who came to us alone. She had been shot in the leg. Someone placed a tourniquet on her wound, and on her little forehead was written the time when the tourniquet was placed. We realized that every minute was critical in order to prevent her condition from deteriorating.” Shitrit recalls, “The girl was named Ofek. She went through an indescribable inferno and lost quite a bit of blood, yet she was very calm and didn’t cry at all. We treated her quickly. We understood from the soldiers who were there that her parents had also been wounded by gunfire and that their condition was unknown. We understood that more wounded were expected to arrive at the junction, and we sent a report to the MDA call center so that additional helicopters and intensive care vehicles would be dispatched to us.”
They couldn’t stop thinking about Ofek. After two weeks of uncertainty, Yarin managed to locate Ofek’s family and was updated that they had all survived: “We managed to contact the family and they explained that they had been shot in the safe room of their house.”
Yarin and Gali got to meet Ofek and her family. For the emotional meeting, they brought Ofek a gift, a toy unicorn on which was written: “To Ofek the heroine, with great love, Gali and Yarin from MDA.” “What was etched in me from all this Black Saturday, which was indeed very black, was Ofek’s evacuation,” Gali shares, “something about her calmness, a little girl who was wounded and was so calm; it’s not trivial. To meet her walking on two legs and smiling was very moving.”
