MDA Paramedic Yarin Shitrit from the Jerusalem MDA station thought his night shift between Friday night and Saturday morning was about to end, but when the sirens began at 6:30 AM, he and his colleague Gali Shaya-Simon were asked to return to their Mobile Intensive Care Unit (MICU) vehicle to help out in the South.
Yarin and Gali were sent in their MICU to the Ofakim area – a city that had come under an intense attack by the terrorists. The team treated many patients there, one after the other – but one case stood out in Yarin’s memory. At one point, the team was called to drive to an area very close to the Gaza border. “We treated a little girl, just six years old, who came to us on her own. She had been shot in the leg. Someone had placed a tourniquet above her wound and had written the time at which it was placed on her little forehead. We understood that each passing minute was crucial to prevent her from deteriorating,” Yarin says. “Her name was Ofek. She went through an unspeakable hell and lost a lot of blood, and yet she was very calm and didn’t cry at all. We treated her quickly. We understood from the soldiers who were present that her parents had sustained gunshot wounds too; their condition was unknown. We knew that more casualties were set to arrive at the junction we were at, which we reported to the MDA dispatch center so that they would send more helicopters and MICUs.”
The team couldn’t stop thinking about Ofek. After two weeks of uncertainty, Yarin managed to locate her family and learned that they had all survived: “We were able to get in touch with the family and understood that they had been shot while in the safe room in their home.”
Yarin and Gali had the privilege of meeting Ofek and her family. Yarin and Gali brought a gift for Ofek – a unicorn doll, on which they’d written: “For Ofek, the hero, with lots of love from Gali and Yarin from MDA.” “The thing that I remember most clearly from that dark Saturday, which really was a very dark day, was treating Ofek,” Gali recalls. “Something about her calmness – a little girl who had been injured and was so calm – it’s not to be taken for granted. Being able to meet her and see her smiling, walking on two feet was very moving.” 