Medical Personnel Share Harrowing Accounts from October 7 in Special Project
A special project details the harrowing experiences of medical personnel during the October 7 attacks, highlighting healthcare workers who balanced deep personal trauma with their professional duties.
Three years after the October 7 attacks, a special project reveals the unimaginable moments experienced by medical personnel during the events of Black Saturday. In the video series titled "06:29 - Between Pain and Care", Clalit Health Services staff members Guy, Neil, Michaela, Ronit, and Sigal share their harrowing stories of being torn between deep personal anxiety and their professional oaths.
In the Emergency Room and Under Fire
"We declared death more than once or twice that morning, working in five teams like in Formula 1," recalls Dr. Guy Barsky, a trauma surgeon at Soroka Medical Center. The severe scenes in the emergency room are permanently etched in his memory: "The cleaner, when she was cleaning and wringing out the mop... it was simply blood." Confronted with an overwhelming number of casualties, he recalls a chilling moment trying to save a five-year-off-fatally wounded child: "Because it's a child, I personally couldn't stop and I continued far beyond what I really should have."
For Neil Kirscht Levy, nursing manager at the Avshalom health center, the war exacted an unbearable personal toll when she learned that her sister Rimon and brother-in-law Yagav had been kidnapped. "When we understood they were shooting at their house... hearing voices in Arabic while texting, she simply disappeared." Despite this, she reported to the clinic. After Rimon was released in a hostage deal and learned that her husband Yagav was murdered, Neil shares: "When she returned... and realized the deal was over, she simply fell into an abyss and said, 'They told me he was being released'." Amidst all the pain, her work provided strength: "To help others and be there for them and understand them, that is the greatest thing I have been privileged to experience in this life."
Field Clinics and Mental Toll
Michaela Kuritzky, nursing manager at the Women's Health Center in Netivot, found herself turning her home into a field clinic within seconds. When a kibbutz member arrived at her house with wounded and bleeding hands, she shifted gears: "I really felt a switch that I make in my brain." While treating him using improvised emergency equipment, she testifies: "The nurse in me acted, completely."
In the north of the country, Ronit Halevi, nursing manager at the Merom Galil clinic, operated out of an absolute sense of commitment to patients evacuated from their homes. "I would risk my life quite a few times, it's really functioning as the living-dead." This came while she was consumed with anxiety over her son's fate: "The son is in Gaza, and there's no word from him for months."
The war naturally impacted people not only physically, but also deeply psychologically. National psychologist Sigal Sidlik Alon managed an assistance command center that faced "ceaseless flooding." All this while her husband's brother was classified as missing during those hours.
Only later did word arrive that he was in a safe place. Looking back, she explains how she endured: "The fact that we spent the whole day trying to give help, that is what allowed us to survive."
