Romi Dar, an MDA volunteer EMT at Netanya Station, was at home when he started reading reports on the events in the south on the black Saturday:
“I realized something was unusual when I started to see the videos. I wrote to my volunteer’s manager that I want to assist the MDA teams in the south. In about 20 minutes I was crewed with an ambulance driver who picked me up from my home and we drove to Ofakim MDA station.
“It was very hard to hear the reports on the way there. We had rockets alarms sounding on our way there, I slowly started to realize what I was heading to” Romi recalls “We arrived in Ofakim and assisted on operating an improvised hospital at the station. A police officer who was critically injured from gunfire arrived and sadly he was pronounced dead. This was the first dead body I saw that day. Simultaneously to the MDA teams that were operating in the city under fire, more and more injured started to arrive at the improvised hospital. We treated them until I was called to Yated, to treat more gunshot casualties”.
“For several minutes we drove on the road completely alone. There was not a car in sight. I felt like it was Yom Kippur. A military jeep stopped us and handed over to us three more gunshot victims from the party. Later, we returned with the ambulance to Ofakim. The sight of so many bodies on the street stays in my mind. I went there to provide medical treatment and save lives. We heard so many horrible stories from the survivors, they told us about the ones who didn’t survive. This was a day I will never forget.”
