Lior Levi, a paramedic from MDA Jerusalem, married and a father of four, arrived for a routine morning shift at the MDA station in Gush Etzion that Saturday. However, his team was also instructed to travel and reinforce the southern region.
“We prepared ourselves, put on our bulletproof vests and helmets, and started driving south. On the way, we heard radio reports from MDA teams already in the south treating casualties. Every second, a report came in about another seriously wounded person being evacuated. We began to understand the magnitude of the chaos, to understand where we were going, to an event unlike anything we had known.”
When the team arrived in the south, they were called to treat three seriously wounded individuals from a shooting. “We began performing life-saving treatments and evacuated them to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon,” Lior recounts, “We finished at the hospital, cleaned the blood from the ambulance, and were dispatched towards Zikim Junction to treat several more seriously wounded individuals.”
Lior and the team arrived at an active combat zone, “amidst incessant rocket fire and Kalashnikov gunfire. They were shooting at us; you could hear the bullets whistling over your head. Every second, a missile. You’d hear a ‘boom’ from one side, and a second later, a ‘boom’ from the other. Our ambulance was hit by shrapnel. We witnessed extremely difficult sights, bodies strewn on the roads, things I will never forget in my life. A true battlefield.
I felt that I might lose my life. Between treatments, I called my wife and told her to kiss the children and that there was a chance I wouldn’t be coming home.
We reached our casualty at Zikim Junction, a severely wounded soldier with a bullet wound to his head that had penetrated his helmet. Immediately after we closed the doors, we heard close-range gunfire. We thought they were shooting at our ambulance; we wanted to get away as quickly as possible, but he was very seriously wounded, disoriented, restless, and we had to perform several actions first to save his life, and only then did we evacuate him to the hospital.”
The team fought for the young soldier’s life, even though his chances of surviving the severe injury were not high.
