|
Trending Topics
|
Those Who Manned the Israel Fire and Rescue Services Hotline Recall Oct. 7
(Israel Hayom) Itsik Saban - In the first hours of the Oct. 7 massacre, a call that reached the Fire and Rescue Services hotline reported: "In Sderot, near the library...many dead. Hamas came in here and shot everyone at the station by the library. Hurry, there are people here...many people dead. They're driving around in their vehicles shooting." That morning, the calls flooding the hotline were emergency pleas from residents of the western Negev, from Nova festivalgoers, from terrified people begging for help in their last minutes. Calls were cut off suddenly, sometimes by a burst of gunfire. Idan Hazan, the shift commander at the Southern District command-and-control center, remembers the first calls, "choked whispers from my own firefighters on their way to work: 'Idan, they're shooting at me.'...My friends were murdered, and I will never see them again." "I'll never forget a call from a family in Be'eri or in Kfar Aza. They were screaming: 'We're burning, they set our house on fire!' - and then the line went dead....My job is to save lives, and in that moment, I realized there was nothing I could do." Capt. Keren Hiba Naim, commander of the national command-and-control center, recalled that these were not normal calls. This time, they were from people trapped in a nightmare with no escape: fire raging inside, terrorists outside. "We were used to telling civilians to move to another room, to open a window for fresh air. But here, we couldn't say that. On one side, terrorists. On the other, flames. What can you possibly say to someone in that situation?"