'We fought tooth and nail to save every casualty'

Zvi Tiber, a paramedic from the Alfei Menashe MDA station, lives far from the Gaza Envelope. But that day, he, too, found himself in the South of Israel, treating and evacuating the wounded under fire as part of the response provided by Magen David Adom to the horrific events in the Gaza Envelope on October 7.

Zvi awoke early that morning to the sound of sirens and explosions. He immediately contacted the MDA ambulance driver who lived nearby, and together, they prepared the Mobile Intensive Care Unit (MICU) for the possibility that they would be called on to help. Their regional manager at MDA contacted them and asked them to go down to the South with their armored ambulance to support the medical teams on the ground. They were soon on their way.

“I’m a paramedic,” Zvi said. “Usually, when there’s a terror attack or a shooting, within 15 minutes, the casualties are no longer on the scene. We get them out of there as soon as possible. On our long southbound ride, we thought that by the time we’d completed the journey from Karnei Shomron to Ofakim, the whole thing would be over. We had no idea what was happening. At that point, no one realized the enormity of the horrors.”

On the way, the team was confronted with ghastly sights from the battlefield. “The whole of the South burned. Ofakim was a war zone, and we treated casualties there,” he said.

What did he encounter?

While treating their first casualty that day, a police officer who had been shot, the team began to understand that this was a much more complex situation than they had expected.

“He was the most lightly injured person we dealt with that day. He had two gunshot wounds. I took two bandages and applied pressure to stop the bleeding. Another officer who arrived with him experienced an anxiety attack. Both of them – two tough cops – embraced each other, broke down in tears, spoke about the desperate battle they’d been forced to fight against dozens of terrorists, about friends who had fallen, and said they were sure they wouldn’t make it out of there alive. I began to get a sense of what was going on.

“We did a few such rounds of treatment and evacuation, and then I found myself treating civilians. The person I remember best was a young woman who had been at the Nova music festival,” said Zvi. “She and her boyfriend had hidden inside a ‘migunit’ – a small concrete structure to protect from rocket attacks. The terrorists hurled grenades at them and lit a fire at the entrance to the shelter.

"They had inhaled smoke, choked, and made the incredible decision to leave. On their way out of the migunit, she walked on ground that was ablaze. Her feet were scorched, and then she was shot at. She sustained a gunshot wound in her knee. We treated both of them and evacuated them to Soroka Hospital. On our way back, I wrote the medical report – meaning, I wrote what I saw, what the circumstances were, and what treatment I gave. I remember thinking to myself – ‘Is this a movie? What I’m writing here is a script. None of it feels real.’”

Zvi and his team treated countless injured people that day, but there was one case that he will not easily forget: “I treated a five-year-old boy from Rahat; he was alone without a single family member. He had sustained serious gunshot wounds. He looked drained, he was weak, and he didn’t stop crying out for his mother. As a father, I found it exceedingly difficult to put my emotions aside. It turned out that he had been working with his father in the greenhouses. The terrorists shot at them from close range; the father was killed, but his uncle was able to escape with him. I fought to save that kid. I fought for his life. We evacuated him in critical condition. Since then, I’ve constantly asked myself what happened to him. Recently, I read an account in the media that reported that he was alive. I was so happy; I had done everything I could for him, and I wasn’t sure he would survive.”

The team treated many severely injured people; Zvi remembers them all and can describe their wounds and the treatment they were each given.

“Some of them we evacuated to the hospital ourselves; others were transferred to helicopters for rapid evacuation. That night, we came to Sderot. After a full day of treating war casualties, nothing prepared us for what we would see there. Corpses lying on the streets everywhere we went; horrific sights like nothing I’d seen before. We did everything we could,” Zvi concludes. “We fought tooth and nail to save each and every person we encountered.”