On that Shabbat morning when war broke out, Michaela Koretsky, a nurse, woke up to the noise of missiles and sirens. She immediately understood that something terrible was happening. She and her family entered their ‘safe room’, and after a few moments, she received a phone call from a member of the kitat konenut (the armed civilian squad that protects the settlement). “Are you home?” said the voice on the other side of the line. “Someone is injured and needs immediate medical treatment; can I bring him to you?” Michaela is a midwife at the Soroka Medical Center in the city of Beer Sheva and has been the nurse of Kibbutz Alumim for the past 17 years.
Michaela left the safe room to attend to her injured neighbor and lay him down on her kitchen floor, under a table. She began to treat him using her home first-aid kit and managed to stabilize his condition. Outside the firing noises and sirens continued. Michaela understood that they were in the heart of the battle but knew that the members of the armed civilian squad from the kibbutz were defending them all the time.
Half an hour passed, and her phone rang again. “I’m bringing you someone else who got injured”, said a member of the armed civilian team. Medical equipment was running out, what would they do? “Get me more dressing material and medical equipment!” she requested. They were able to meet her request and she began to bandage and give aid to the second injured person. With the massive gun battles going on outside her house Michaela was scared, but bravely, continued to save their lives.
She explained later: “I did whatever I could, with the help of my husband and his father, who is a war veteran and had been wounded in the Six-Day War. Both he and my husband endangered themselves and left the ‘safe room’ and came to help.”
She managed to stabilize the second injured person but saw that he needed to be taken to hospital as soon as possible. Her husband, together with a neighbor, managed to evacuate him to hospital while the gun battle continued around them.
Throughout the day Michaela was messaging her friends from the kibbutz, amongst them, the wives of the armed civilian team who were fighting bravely. She didn’t mention anything about the people who had been injured so as not to add to the panic. Eventually, the IDF managed to evacuate the members of the kibbutz to a safe place and kill the terrorists.
“I am a midwife,” said Michaela. “I get to witness the miracle of births regularly, but I believe that here we can truly say these people were reborn.”
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