“A real battle for every wounded person”

Zvi Tibber, a paramedic at the MDA Station in Alfei Menashe, lives far from the Gaza Envelope, but he too found himself treating and evacuating victims under fire in southern Israel, as part of Magen David Adom’s response to the horrific events in the Gaza Envelope on October 7.

He woke up early on Saturday morning to the sound of sirens and explosions. He immediately contacted an MDA ambulance driver who lives in his town, and together they manned an intensive care ambulance that was on call. MDA’s regional manager contacted them and asked them to reinforce the MDA staff in the south in a bulletproof ambulance. They quickly got ready and set off. “I’m a paramedic,” Zvi says. “Usually, when there’s an attack or shooting, within 15 minutes there are no more wounded people left at the scene. We evacuate them quickly. On the long way to the south, we thought that by the time we get to Ofakim from Karnei Shomron, everything would be over… We didn’t know what was going on. No one knew the magnitude of the horrors yet.”

Along the way, the team saw more and more scenes that resembled a battlefield. “The whole south was just burning. Ofakim became a battlefield, and we treated the casualties there,” he says. While treating the first casualty of the day, a police officer who had been hit by gunfire, the team began to realize that this was a bigger event than they had thought. “He was the least badly wounded person I treated that day,” Zvi says. “He had two bullet holes. I took two personal bandages and applied pressure until the bleeding stopped. There was another policeman with him, who was suffering from anxiety. Both of them – strong policemen – hugged each other, sobbed, told of desperate fighting with dozens of terrorists, of dead friends. They said that they thought they would not get out of there alive… I began to understand where I had come.

We did several rounds of emergency care and evacuations, and then I found myself dealing with civilians. I remember mainly a young woman from the Nova music festival,” Zvi recalls. “She and her partner had hidden in a mobile shelter, but the terrorists threw grenades at them and lit a fire at the entrance to the shelter. They inhaled smoke, choked and made an unimaginable decision – to leave the shelter. On the way out, she stepped on the fire. Her feet were charred and then she was shot, she had a gunshot wound in the thigh. We treated them both and evacuated them to Soroka Hospital. On the way back, I wrote the medical report. In other words, I wrote down what I saw, what the circumstances were, and what treatment I gave. I remember saying to myself, ‘Is this a movie? I’m writing a script. It all feels unreal.’”

Zvi and his team treated countless victims who were fighting for their lives, but there is one who does not get out of his head: “I treated a five-year-old boy from Rahat. He was alone without any family members. He suffered a very serious gunshot wound. He was pale, weak and didn’t stop calling his mother. As a father myself, it was very difficult for me to disconnect my emotions from the treatment. It turns out he had been with his father who worked in greenhouses. The terrorists shot them at close range. The father was killed, but the uncle managed to smuggle him out. I fought for this kid. A real battle for his life. We evacuated him in critical condition. Since then, I kept asking myself what happened to him. Not long ago, I read in the news that he was alive. I was so happy. I did everything I could, I wasn’t sure he would survive.” The team treated many wounded people in serious condition, all of whom Zvi remembers and can describe their injuries and treatment: “Some of them we evacuated, others we transferred to helicopters for rapid evacuation. At night we reached Sderot, after a full day of treating war wounded, but nothing prepared us for the sights in the city. Dead people were scattered everywhere in the streets; very harsh sights unlike any other. We did everything we could,” Zvi concludes. “A real battle for every wounded person.”