'The country was burning, and I was watching it happen'

The MDA’s Joint National Command Center is the organization’s central nervous system. From there, the National Dispatch Center, whose staff supervises the work of the local dispatch centers, receives reports, coordinates missions, and provides instructions about what needs to be done. The National Dispatch Center sees the big picture of what’s happening across the country for all the events that MDA and the State of Israel must deal with. Through the dispatch center, the organization’s management can understand the situation, make its decisions, and hand down instructions accordingly to manage the situation and give the best possible response.

On October 7, MDA call centers around the country received over 21,000 emergency calls, compared to approximately 4,000 on a regular Shabbat. Minutes into the attack, the call centers were provided with backup staffers who were called in from their homes. Even before 7:00 AM, while heavy barrages of rockets were being launched at Israel, MDA staff were already sent out to treat people who had been injured at sites where rockets had fallen, some of whom were severely wounded or even killed – for example, in Rishon LeZion, Ashkelon, Kfar Aviv and the Bedouin region in the Negev desert. Soon, reports started flowing in on the infiltration of terrorists into towns, villages, and military bases. The MDA senior management team quickly understood this was an unusual event and came to the Joint National Information Center to manage the crisis from there, together with the National Dispatch Center staff. One of them was Ido Rosenblatt, head of MDA’s IT and dispatch centers division. “Very quickly, we had a fairly good idea of what was happening. We sent regular updates to the IDF, the Police, and the other relevant authorities. We held a situation assessment with our Director General very early in the morning, after which we were able to hand down instructions to the National Dispatch Center and from there to the rest of the organization.”

The National Dispatch Center is staffed by highly experienced dispatch center operators, who must be very professional, fast-thinking, and cool under pressure. All are qualified EMTs and paramedics. That’s precisely how Michael Dor, a shift manager at the National Dispatch Center, could be described. He managed the morning shift that Shabbat. Michael had already managed major emergencies in the past, but, like many of his colleagues, he felt that the events of that day were on another level entirely. Michael was a youth volunteer from age 15 and has worked at MDA from a very young age. He served in a number of different positions in the dispatch centers and, for the last five years, has worked as a shift manager at the National Dispatch Center.

Michael describes his shift that Shabbat, which was meant to begin at 7 AM. “I left my house and heard the sirens. I heard everything over the internal communication system, and by 6:35 AM, I was already sitting at the shift manager’s desk in the dispatch center. It was very strange. I’ve been through wars and escalations in the security situation, and I’ve seen some significant and difficult incidents. This time, it was different from the get-go. Tzofit Bartal, the shift manager who had taken the night shift, sat facing the screen, watching the IDF Homefront Command’s instructions, and updated us about every siren going off around the country. It was crazy. Omri Levi, the manager of the National Dispatch Center, was also called in and told us that there were also terrorists infiltrating Israel from Gaza on gliders. Soon afterward, we received a call regarding two combat soldiers who had been shot at Yad Mordechai Junction, and at exactly the same time, the Home Front Command operations room called us from the Urim base, which is right next to the Gaza border.”

Michael takes a deep breath before describing that phone call. “We have an open emergency line between us. Every day, we check that the emergency phone line to them works as part of our regular checklist at the beginning of each shift to ensure everything is in order. When we received that phone call from them, I assumed it was the regular checkup call. I answered and asked if we could do this later. The soldier on the other end of the line said, ‘I have a soldier who’s been shot in the stomach; our base has been breached.’” Michael spoke with the soldier, guided her on what to do, and updated his senior managers. Throughout the morning, Michael received several more calls from the same soldier and spoke with two others. He later found out that, unfortunately, two of the three soldiers with whom he spoke were killed during the terrorist attack on the base. “I felt truly horrified,” Michael says. “We understood that we were in a different situation  altogether, and that we needed to work differently.”

This was also understood in the field as well as by MDA management, whose members immediately realized the enormity of the moment. After holding a situation assessment, management instructed the teams to keep the night shift workers there, which doubled the number of workers in the dispatch center and had a significant effect, especially since it was a Saturday shift. The decision was possible because it was taken before 7:00 AM when the shifts were supposed to switch. “We told all night shift workers around the country not to go home,” Michael says. “But in truth, there was no need to do so – all of the MDA workers felt a distinct sense of purpose and understood the importance of the task. We all realized that we were in the midst of a historic event. The MDA management also instructed the workers to transfer to emergency mode: we raised the alert level to the highest possible degree, ‘maximum capacity,’ meaning that there was not a single ambulance in the country without a team assigned to it. For that to happen, we sent out immediate messages to 30,000 MDA staff members, with the vast majority being MDA volunteers.” MDA’s ability to transfer from routine to emergency mode in a matter of moments is made possible due to its innovative use of technology, which is used by a highly trained, professional staff.

Following the situation assessment, COO Gil Moskowitz instructed that bullet-proof ambulances be sent from MDA divisions around the country to the South. Michael recalls how this instruction was handed down as he heard what was happening around the shift manager’s desk: “There were some very difficult conversations taking place around me. I could hear the dispatch operators talking, but I wasn’t able to digest what they were saying. The dispatch center staff dealt with the horror of what was going on from the other end of the phone line; I could see them having unbearable conversations, going into all of the important details in order to get the best possible picture of where the emergencies were taking place and what exactly was happening there. I heard them giving life-saving instructions – how to apply a tourniquet, to hide, to lie down flat on the floor in cases of fire, and so on. From those phone calls and reports coming in over the internal radio system, we were able to piece together the bigger picture. While receiving phone calls about the shooting attacks, we also received reports informing us of several deaths due to rocket attacks on one of the Bedouin villages in the South.”

The flow of information to the National Dispatch Center was endless: it passed down the management’s instructions to those in the field and, at the same time, received information that it transferred to the IDF, the hospitals, and other emergency services. “I received information from the dispatch operators: a call we received about six soldiers who had been shot at Zikim Military Base, a call about soldiers in Yad Mordechai, soldiers who had been injured at Re’im Military Base, more than 15 wounded people who were being treated at the Sderot MDA station. We quickly realized we were dealing with dozens of infiltrations into military bases, towns, and villages. The country was burning, and I could see it happening in front of my eyes. The MDA command and control center started receiving photos and videos that were sent to us by wounded people and others who had called in. I saw them all – it was a difficult site. I received and passed on an unfathomable amount of information that Shabbat. I wrote down everything.”

Michael continues his story: “I was always taught at MDA that we fight for every patient – if a patient is in a barely accessible location, we’ll send a helicopter; someone injured at sea will have a boat sent to them, and we’ll get the Navy involved; the Rescue Unit will be involved where necessary; MDA even manages to reach victims of terror attacks in distant countries. And now, we weren’t faced with a single such incident, but hundreds of them, and we were stretched to the very limits of our abilities with everything we had. Normally, MDA has two helicopters at its disposal; that Saturday, we operated three, and everyone worked non-stop. Moreover, throughout the day, the Air Force kept in constant, direct contact with us. Representatives from their Control Center and the Aviation Authority sat with us in the National Call Center. It was incredible and gave me a lot of strength. Dozens of wounded people owe their lives to that decision. As I said – I sat down at my desk at 6:35 AM, and the first time I got up was at 4:30 PM.”

Michael also reflects on his own personal loss. “Among all the updates we were receiving, I heard that we’d lost contact with MDA paramedic Amit Man, a close friend of mine. During that shift, the dispatch center received several phone calls from her. She was trapped in the kibbutz clinic and treated the wounded there. We were good friends, and I went through a very difficult period after her death. I kept myself busy with work so that I wouldn’t have to deal with her loss. It’s difficult to describe the mixed feelings I had. On the one hand, I’d have wanted to speak to her during her last moments, but on the other hand, I know that if I’d spoken to her, I wouldn’t have been able to function. Amit wasn’t the only one; I received horrifying reports about Peter Lasnik, who was shot at Urim Junction; Hananel Jerfy, who was shot in Sderot; Avia Hetzroni from Be’eri who was bleeding and no one was able to reach him – all of these reports went through me, and I tried my best to stay professional, like being on auto-pilot.

“It was an unusual situation, so we had to act unusually. We landed helicopters in places that weren’t set up for it, we took crazy risks, we had to adjust ourselves to the circumstances, and many people were saved thanks to that approach. Dozens, if not hundreds. That Shabbat will stay with me for the rest of my life,” concludes Michael.