There’s no way I can do justice to the story I heard tonight, but feel like I need to tell it anyway. In truth, I’m not even sure a Hollywood film director could do it justice. Some of it also gets pretty grisly, so take this as a warning.
Tonight during my on-call, I heard one of my patients, who I will call Ari (not his real name) talking to his nurse, telling her how he got to the ICU. Things were quiet on the unit and so I asked if I could listen too. What followed was us standing next to his bed for a full hour, while he told us his story of how he was injured on October 7th.
He works as a fighter in one of the security services, and was heading home after overnight work. On the way home he stopped at a petrol station, when he started to hear the air raid sirens and rockets coming in. His intuition was to head straight home, but his wife told him on the phone to stay and take cover in the gas station secure space, which in retrospect saved his life. It turns out that there were terrorists outside his village, and they were shooting and killing any car that approached, and had he driven home he would likely not have survived.
At this time Ari started hearing shouts of “Alahu Akhbar” along with shots, and realised that in addition to the rockets, there was an infiltration of terrorists into Israel. He was armed only with his personal Glock 9mm handgun, so he drove to the Sderot police station, hoping to pick up a rifle there, and then to go out and defend the communities.
At this point I got called away to see another patient, so I missed part of the story, but from what I gathered when I got back, at the police station he didn’t get a chance to get a rifle. Eighteen seconds after he walked in, the terrorists arrived in a pickup truck. There was a family car outside, and they shot the parents, thankfully ignoring the screaming kids in the back. They then broke into the police station, using rockets (or perhaps RPGs) and AK-47s.
Ari ran up to the roof of the police station, along with I think it was 3 male and 2 female police officers. They had assault rifles and he still only his handgun. He drew me a diagram, and it showed two entries onto the roof, with a wall around the edge, and a number of solar panels in the middle. The police officers positioned themselves in the corners, but he knew that with only a handgun, he’d need to be close to the terrorists when they broke onto the roof, and so hid behind a solar panel.
One of the female officers, Nurit (also not her real name), sounded terrified, and he managed to break into a generator room on the roof, trying to hide her inside, but she refused.
They took up their positions, before two terrorists broke out onto the roof. The first one was a giant of a man, carrying an AK-47. My patient jumped out of hiding and emptied a magazine into both of them from a few meters range. He remembers who the terrorist looked down and saw his injuries. Ari stepped away to reload, and the range was so close that the terrorist didn’t even bother aiming his assault rifle. He simple held it horizontally and sprayed his target. Ari immediately felt a bullet hit him in what he thought was his foot, but he looked down and couldn’t see any blood. It turned out eventually to be a shot in the thigh that had hit the nerve, causing referred pain and loss of feeling in his distal foot. Meanwhile the terrorist collapsed dead from the hits of Ari’s bullets.
At this point he was the only one injured. As he sat there he called over the police woman, M, asking her to give him her shirt to make an arterial tourniquet. She didn’t know how, and another policemen there said he wasn’t sure, so my patient talked them through it. In retrospect he said that the tourniquet must have not been tight enough, because given that it ended up staying on for 7 hours, he would have lost his leg if it had been.
He then realised that he had been shot in the abdomen as well, and he tried to plug the hole with his finger (I didn’t break it to him that this won’t do much for abdominal gun shot wounds). Soon afterwards he started coughing up blood, and it was only then that he realised how seriously injured he was.
Nurit kept talking to him and reassuring him, promising him that he would see his 1½ year old boy again. He told me how she was engaged to be married, so I guess they spoke about that too.
Soon after this, and while still talking to her, Nurit was suddenly shot in the head and collapsed, along with a police man next to her. A Hamas sniper had managed to get onto a nearby roof and simply shot them both in the head. Ari told me several times how sudden it was. That she wasn’t “Gosses” (ancient Hebrew for someone who is dying) – she simply collapsed in front of him mid speech. The police officer next to her, also shot in the head, had blood sprayed all over the wall behind him “like in the movies”. A third police officer next to him was also shot in the head but this time it seems to have glanced off the back of his skull, taking a lump of bone with it. My patient described how he was surprised at how little blood there was, but that he could see the policeman’s brain pulsating in his skull. Meanwhile the police officer kept talking. Ari couldn’t bring himself to tell him about his horrific injury, believing it would make him panic. Miraculously that police officer survived, and ended up being taken to Barzilai Hospital and then on to the trauma centre at Tel Hashomer for neurosurgery.
My own patient, Ari, was still lying on the floor, which is why he survived. Most of the others on the roof were killed by that sniper.
He also describes how another police woman played dead in the far corner, covered in water from a burst pipe. At one point one of the hand grenades thrown by the terrorists landed next to her (I forgot to mention that they were using those too), and she quickly picked it up and threw it back at them. She suffered only a mild shrapnel injury to her hand, and actually visited Ari at the Barzilai ICU in the week or two since the attack.
The initial attack started before 7am. It was over 7 hours before they were successfully rescued. First to try to rescue them were special forces from the Yamam Unit of the police. These are the people who do hostage rescue and are the equivalent of SWAT. The first four officers arrived, and their protocol, when there is an active hostage situation, is apparently to burst in immediately. What they didn’t know was that the terrorists had come equipped with a huge amount of weapons, explosives and traps. They had placed explosives on most of the doors and stairs. The first Yamam officer was immediately killed. Their bomb disposal guy (if I understood the Hebrew term) was injured, and they had to retreat. More forces came but it was very slow work. In the end Ari and the police officers on the roof were rescued by forces coming up a fireman’s ladder onto the roof.
The Sderot police station was in the news because of a standoff between the terrorists and army outside. The army brought in a tank fired shells, and at one point used an armoured bulldozer to start taking apart the building. The trouble was that it was known that there remained one police officer 2 floors down from the roof, holed up in a concrete space, and so they had to be careful. Otherwise the obvious thing to do would be to simply blow up the entire building on the terrorists. Eventually he was rescued, and Ari told me that the police station building doesn’t exist anymore (technically not completely true. You can see what remains in the photo below).
Ari’s own emotional experience was also interesting. Throughout the 7 hours, he felt essentially no pain. He describes having come to terms with dying very early on – even as he hid behind the solar panels ready to jump out at the terrorists when they would come up onto the roof. He just assumed he wasn’t going to survive. It was only when he was rescued, placed in an armoured ambulance, and then transferred to the regular ambulance, that he feared dying - that he had come so far only to die on the road.
The paramedic in the ambulance kept telling him to stay awake. He also heared her reporting on the radio that she was on the way to Barzilai with a critically injures patient, bleeding out and losing consciousness, and he remembered how scared that made him feel. Ari remained conscious until they pulled into the hospital, and he remembers being asked his name, and mumbling something in response, before blacking out.
He was taken immediately for surgery, where they found a bullet had hit his stomach (hence the coughing up blood) and also transected his pancreas. It had passed close to his vena cava (main vein returning blood to the heart) and had stopped short of his spinal cord. The second bullet went through his thigh into his buttock where it remains.
The surgeons repaired what they could, and he later underwent two ERCP procedures (endoscope down throat into stomach to the opening of the bile ducts), to place stents into his pancreas and biliary system to maintain patency.
Since then he has continued to improve and is looking forward to going home to see his toddler, and his wife (who he told me was pregnant although they hadn’t yet informed their family before the attack happened). He asked me if he would walk again, and while I deferred to the expertise of the orthopods for this, I did say that it seemed to me likely that he would. He has movement of his hip and knee, and only lost sensation to part of his foot, although he has significant neuropathic pain there. My understanding is that peripheral nerves can often re-grow, although do so very slowly.
At the end of his story, I feel tremendously privileged to have been a witness to all this. It felt as dramatic as any episode of Fauda, and I was struck by the incredible heroism of someone who when it all kicked off, instead of driving home, drove to a police station to arm up and go and rescue people.
(I should say that my patient gave me full permission to tell his story, although you can see I changed his name and that of the police woman who died.
As a post-script there was an absurd moment where Ari’s dad, who was also at his bedside and asked me what I was doing here, started to tell me how heroic he thought it was that we doctors come over to help in the time of this war. I literally laughed at the incongruity of what he was saying, comparing doing what was essentially our normal day job in this reinforced ICU, whilst his son had just told us of literally being shot whilst saving others).
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