Heroic tales from Oct. 7: United Hatzalah on the ‘road of death’ - opinion

Where were you and what did you do?

Which dates in your life history can you remember? 

I can picture the Connecticut music room, exactly where I was sitting, the ominous crackle of the PA system on November 22, 1963, when American president John F. Kennedy was shot. 

On July 16, 1969, I remember looking up at the clear Negev sky and realizing that Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon. I was writing at my desk in Jerusalem when Yitzhak Rabin was shot on November 4, 1995. 

I was buying my daughters fancy dresses in Tel Aviv for their brother’s wedding when the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. 

Where were you on October 7? A year after the catastrophe, that’s still a compelling question among us Israelis. 

When I recently asked nurse/administrator Itzik Kara where he was that day, I expected him to tell me about being on duty as patients arrived from the South. But no. 

A story not to be forgotten 

Here’s the story he told me – one that typifies the best of Israel that shouldn’t be forgotten among the horrors of that black day.

Itzik Kara, 56, father of three, is a nurse, a paramedic, and an administrator. He’s experienced in intensive care, recovery, and surgical nursing. Kara served as a combat medic in the Givati infantry brigade and was previously an ambulance driver for Magen David Adom. 

In short, he’s a good man to have around in a crisis.

These days, Kara is the director of operational administration of Hadassah Hospital’s new but partly under-construction Gandel Rehabilitation Center on Mount Scopus.

In his spare time, Kara is a volunteer and team head for United Hatzalah of Israel.

One of United Hatzalah’s yellow intensive care ambulances is regularly parked at his home in Modi’in.

“By 7:05, I realized that the Hamas Nukhba special forces were inside Sderot. I am the head of a paramedic team, and I had an ambulance parked outside. Nonetheless, at 7:30 the dispatcher at United Hatzalah told me the situation was too dangerous to head south. But, as the understanding of the scope of the events changed, by 7:45 the decision was made to send teams to rescue as many wounded as possible, danger or not,” he recounted.

An ambulance team, like that of a tank, requires four people.

The first person he called couldn’t come because he had to drive his son to a military base. Kara posted a call for volunteers’ help on the Modi’in United Hatzalah WhatsApp group. Urgently, he needed an Advanced Life Support-qualified driver for the ICU ambulance. 

Sergio Geralnik, 59, a software engineer, was already in synagogue, but he had taken his cellphone. Geralnik went home to get ready. 

Geralnik’s wife, Caryn Gale, 58, is also a paramedic. She told him that if he was going, she was going, too. Gale changed from her brightly colored holiday outfit to black jeans and stuffed a handful of lollipops in her pocket. 

She left the holiday food on the hot plate because Kara told them they would probably be home by lunch. The fourth volunteer was Noemi Dray, 27, a nursing student who immigrated as a child from France.

At the United Hatzalah office, the four volunteers gathered their equipment and suited up in bulky flak jackets and helmets. Sirens screeched and rockets were flying, but they kept on driving.

THE TEAM was directed to the Heletz Junction, named for a moshav between Ashkelon, Kiryat Gat, and Sderot. From there, they entered Sderot, where the battle between Hamas and the police for the police station was raging. 

They were advised by local paramedics, to their disappointment, that it was impossible to get close enough to help.Gale said, “I was thinking that we’d turn around, go home to eat lunch, but then suddenly everything changed.”

They began the drive back to the Heletz Junction, which was gradually becoming a makeshift treatment center. 

They were thrown back and forth as the ambulance swerved to avoid hitting broken cars, debris, and dead bodies. They got a call from a military vehicle carrying a soldier with a head wound. 

The soldier was moved to their ambulance. Kara diagnosed a punctured lung and a hand injury and inserted an IV. Gale and Dray provided oxygen and staunched the bleeding while Geralnik raced him to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba.

Their second soldier, also with a head wound, had already spent five hours lying in an armored personnel carrier, hit by a Hamas anti-tank missile and a fragmentation grenade explosion.

“His blood pressure was as dangerously low as it could get,” Kara said. “We put in an IV line, treated his wounds, and drove him to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon.”

Kara’s team of four continued all day, driving north and south along Route 232, picking up and treating the wounded. Route 232 begins at the Kerem Shalom Crossing at the border with the Gaza Strip and passes kibbutzim Re’im, Be’eri, and Kfar Aza. 

It continues northeast to meet Highway 4 near Sderot before turning northward to Ashkelon. Hamas sharpshooters were positioned along the road, and thousands of rockets fell. Route 232 gained the moniker “Road of Death.”

“When you are so determined to save lives, you don’t think of the danger,” Kara said. He was Gale’s paramedic teacher, and she said he’s incredibly focused.

As the rescue helicopters arrived, they began transferring patients to the air medical crews. 

“My son messaged me and asked where I was,” Gale said. “When I told him I was outside Kfar Aza, he told me that was impossible and that the kibbutz had been taken over by terrorists. We parked outside with other ambulances. Busloads of soldiers were being bused in, and residents were being brought out.”

A shrieking terrorist was apprehended in the field near where they had parked. Little children rescued from the kibbutz were crying hysterically. Gale remembered her lollipops and passed them out.

Kara did an ultrasound in their ambulance for a pregnant kibbutznik who had escaped. At 10 p.m., they went home.

Gale took the food off the hot plate, but she couldn’t eat.

Kara showered and updated his family. The next morning, Sunday, he learned that all the roads they had traveled along, especially Route 232, were closed. He drove to Jerusalem and went back to his day job at Hadassah Medical Center. Gale and Garelnik’s home filled with their children and grandchildren, who needed a safer space.

Kara said, “Only on Sunday did I realize what danger we were in on Oct. 7. We were concentrating so hard on caring for the wounded, that even though we saw the murdered bodies and we heard the rockets, we somehow had the ability to ignore them and keep working. 

“Thankfully, none of us was wounded, and the ambulance wasn’t even scratched. All the patients we rescued survived. There’s only one explanation. To travel through the Road to Death so many times in safety, we had to have had assistance from Above.”

One story. Oct. 7. 

The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.