By Theia Chatelle
KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel — When sirens again sounded in this northern Israel town on a recent Thursday, Ala Ghassan, a paramedic trainee with Magen David Adom, gazed up at the sky with concern.
Pausing for only a few seconds to check for incoming missiles or outgoing interceptors, Ghassan, wearing an MDA flak jacket and helmet, raced toward the shelter located in the basement of the MDA station.
The day before, Hezbollah coordinated with Iran to launch a strike on northern Israel, firing more than 200 missiles in the span of just a few hours.
Since Hezbollah joined the conflict on March 2, it has launched more than 3,500 rockets, missiles and drones at Israel.
Israelis have been killed, including a woman on the verge of being married on March 25 and a man in Nahariya on March 26.
The assault on the border region has ignited sharp anger from some local leaders, who have demanded that the Israeli government come up with a better strategy to protect residents.
But inside the shelter, Ghassam, 21, was focused only on the job at hand, waiting to learn where he would be dispatched to assess damage and to treat victims.
Ghassan recounted why he had joined Israel’s volunteer emergency response service. “Seeing what they did in Majdal Shams is why I am here,” he said.
During Israel’s last war with Hezbollah before the ceasefire of November, 2024, Hezbollah fired missile on a soccer field in Majdal Shams, killing 12 Druze children.
“The oldest was only 16,” Ghassan recounted, with tears in his eyes, tugging at a pin depicting the Druze national colors.
Ghassan is Druze.
So is much of the community in the Golan Heights, which Israel took after Syria attacked Israel from the Heights in 1967. The US recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Heights in 2019.
The Druze community there is small and tight knit, forbidding intermarriage and maintaining a strong collective identity.
‘Emergency teams have grown from two to nine’
Like Ghassan, the Druze, Christian and Jewish EMTs all harbor a shared hope: that as Israel endures yet another war with Hezbollah, “this will be the last,” says Omri Hochman, Kiryat Shmona station director.
Magen David Adom is Israel’s civilian ambulance and emergency response service. Drawing on a network of more than 37,000 employees and volunteers, it has been on the front line of every disaster and conflict response in Israel since it was founded in 1930.
In peacetime, the group functions like a 911 operator, with volunteers listening in on radios to hear about injuries and illnesses near them and dropping everything to respond.
MDA volunteers have delivered babies, resuscitated heart attack victims and turned their own homes into field treatment sites on Oct. 7.
This year, the group has launched a mental health service that dispatches both paramedics and psychiatrists — a desperate need in a country where a third of adults say they need mental health support after years of war.
Now, as missiles, cluster bombs and Hezbollah rockets fall across Israel, MDA volunteers are often the first on the scene. They unfortunately have years of experience.
“Lessons learned from previous rounds of conflict with Hezbollah and Iran have significantly strengthened our readiness, including improved coordination with security forces,” said deputy spokesperson Nadav Matzner.
Eli has been working with Magen David Adom in Kiryat Shmona for more than 20 years. Speaking from behind his desk, Eli, identified only by his first name due to security during wartime, recounts how the whole team has stepped up after the latest round of fighting.
“We usually have two teams operating during any given shift; now we have nine,” Eli says.
In addition to drawing from other response centers in quieter parts of the country, local volunteers are pulling double shifts.
Before he completed his three years of training to become a paramedic, Eli worked as a store manager. But after his father died of a heart attack, Eli recalled, “I didn’t know how to do CPR. I vowed that I would never be in a position like that again.”
When asked how he finds time to sleep or to be with his five children, one of whom is in the army in Lebanon, Eli said, “I sleep, well, sometimes.”
“Right now, most of what we’re seeing are injuries of elderly residents on their way to the shelter,” said Eli, who himself served in a combat battalion in Lebanon.
“But it’s only going to get worse from here, and like the last war with Hezbollah, we expect most injuries to be from shrapnel.”
There is a severe lack of shelters in northern Israel. Only about 40% of homes in the city are equipped with safe rooms.
Maya Gazbo, another volunteer with MDA in Kiryat Shmona, says that many of elderly have simply given up on going to public shelters, due to their distance and mobility issues.
Others who try to make it end up injuring themselves on the way.
After the last round of evacuations in 2024, which left residents living either in government-funded hotels or with family away from the front lines for more than a year, many did not return.
Since the start of the war, Magen David Adom in Kiryat Shmona has had a team of paramedics on standby at a location within a kilometer of Lebanon’s border — at a site that cannot be identified due to security concerns — in case there is a mass-casualty event requiring the evacuation of wounded soldiers.
On the way into the kibbutz, the roads were empty.
Few residents venture out of their homes after dark due to the pattern of missile fire from Hezbollah directed at both civilian centers and Israeli military bases around Mount Meron.
What used to be a municipal office for the kibbutz is largely deserted due to the war.
‘We’ve been preparing for this since Oct. 7’
Safa Aburafa, 32, is something of a veteran, having worked with MDA in Kiryat Shmona for more than five years. He has been showing Ghassan the ropes.
Aburafa set up a command-and-control station in the basement of the shelter, waiting for incoming calls from MDA dispatchers. Periodically, outgoing fire from an Israeli artillery installation sounded and, occasionally, the sound of interceptors shooting down drones launched by Hezbollah.
Aburafa has treated dozens of wounded Israeli civilians in the north in the aftermath of prior Hezbollah missile attacks. He said the work has grown harder this time around, as Israelis who have already lived through one war with Hezbollah are growing accustomed to the conflict and, in many cases, choosing not to go to the shelter.
“By the time the alarm sounds, residents have just seconds to make it to the shelter,” Eli said. “They have to go right away, but we’re seeing that so many don’t.”
Eli notes that MDA has direct lines of communication with both the police and the army, and during wartime those channels become even more important. There was concern after Oct. 7 that Hezbollah would launch a similar cross-border attack, so contingency plans were built to prevent such an eventuality.
So far, the war has claimed the lives of more than a dozen Israelis and injured many more.
“So far, things have been intense, a challenge for all of us, but we’ve been preparing for this since Oct. 7, and it didn’t catch us off guard,” Eli said.
