Two emergency workers from Israel traveled to the Bay Area this week to share their firsthand experiences of the initial confusion and unfolding horror of Oct. 7 when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel.
“We didn’t have a picture of what was going on,” said Zvi Tibber, a senior paramedic with Magen David Adom. “We understood there were terrorists, but we didn’t know the scale. We didn’t understand there were thousands of terrorists. We thought maybe 20, not 3,000.”
Tibber and dispatch officer Ronit Glaser, both first responders with Israel’s emergency medical and disaster service, were called in to work that day amid the chaos of the Hamas rocket attacks and the spreading massacre.
On Wednesday, they recounted their experiences that day to groups at the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund in San Francisco and at Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael, detailing heart-wrenching stories of the tragedy. American Friends of Magen David Adom brought the pair to the U.S. on a speaking tour.
Tibber, who spoke to about 90 people in San Rafael, recalled waking up in Kfar Saba in central Israel that morning to sirens and learning about incoming rockets, violence on the ground and mounting casualties. He jumped into his ambulance and drove south where he encountered violence unlike anything he had seen before.
Tibber described in detail several victims he treated throughout that day when Hamas massacred more than 1,400, injured more than 7,260 and took an estimated 240 hostages into Gaza.
One woman, who Tibber treated for a gunshot wound to her thigh by tying it with a tourniquet, was attending the Nova music festival when Hamas attacked. She and her boyfriend had taken refuge in a shelter that terrorists set on fire, suffocating them with smoke. When the woman attempted to exit the shelter for fresh air, she was shot by Hamas. Her boyfriend pulled her back into the shelter, where they stayed out of the gunfire until they couldn’t hold out any longer.
The pair had to make a run for it through the flames, suffering severe burns, before eventually reaching Tibber and his ambulance.
“I remember her name was Eden, like the garden of Eden,” said Tibber. “Straight out of hell I had to take her.”
Another story was that of a 5-year-old Bedouin boy Tibber transported to a hospital.
The boy had been with his father, uncle, older brothers and cousins in a greenhouse of an agricultural community along the Gaza border when Hamas descended. Tibber described how the boy’s father begged them to spare their lives since they were also Arab, but Hamas killed him anyway.
“You are worse than the Jews – you collaborated with them,” one terrorist said, according to Tibber. The Hamas gunman then shot the boy as he ran away with his surviving family members. His uncle carried him to an Israeli police officer, pleading with him to believe that they were not a part of the attack.
“I’ve treated children in the past, but this was the first time I had a child of this age, 5 years old, calling out for his mother and there’s no mom or dad there,” Tibber said.
“There was no guardian, just me and him, and he had a gunshot wound coming in the front, going out of his back with his guts coming out. He was pale, barely conscious,” Tibber recalled, noting that the child didn’t have the energy to fear an I.V. needle.
He started sobbing and faded away. And I’m pretty sure that was the moment he died.
Miraculously, Tibber said, the boy survived and is expected to fully recover.
Tibber described other scenes from the day, including finding roads blocked by cars with bodies in them, bodies on the roads and many people who were too critically injured to help.
“A lot of the times when they called me up, I would go to the car, see the person and have to tell them, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t treat them. There’s no way.’ I had to put it aside because we needed to take care of the ones we can,” he said.
Glaser, who works in a dispatch center in Jerusalem, described waking up to sirens and driving with her two daughters, 9 and 12, to the office for safety. She handled emergency calls for the next 13 hours, dealing with endless critical situations.
“One of the first calls I answered was a fellow paramedic and she said, ‘Hi, when are you coming?’ And I said ‘Can you tell me what’s going on with you?’” Glaser recalled. “She said, ‘I have one person murdered here. Another person seriously injured, another person moderately injured. I see a lot of terrorists running around in the woods, I see people lying on the ground dead. I hear shooting. It’s still going on. So when are you coming?’”
Glaser wasn’t sure what to do, so she was as honest with the paramedic as she could be.
“I don’t know,” she told her.
Glaser described other stories from the nonstop calls that day. A 9-year-old boy and his 6-year-old sister called as they hid in a closet, their father killed at the entrance of their house, their mother killed in the living room and their 3-year-old brother kidnapped. An American woman called to report that her husband had been shot — both of them remain missing. Another man, with a pregnant wife, took his last breath while on the line with Glaser as he bled from gunfire.
“I heard him fading on the line,” she recalled. “And I said to him, ‘I just want you to look straight, straight forward, thinking of your wife. Think of your unborn baby. Think about how much you love them and how you’re going to see them.’ And he started sobbing and faded away. And I’m pretty sure that was the moment he died.”
Attendees in San Rafael described the speakers’ stories as revealing and shocking, though not surprising.
“It was an eye opener to actually hear face to face from people that were there,” said Jeff, who requested J. only use his first name out of concern for his and his family’s safety, citing the uptick in antisemitism since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. “You’ve got interviews on TV, but that’s a little box that you’re looking at. To see people and hear all of that, you feel much more of a connection.”
Jeff was not the only attendee who expressed a concern about safety. Several community members who J. spoke with at the event declined to talk on the record due to privacy and safety concerns.
Glaser and Tibber said they hope that sharing their experiences will foster a feeling of unity across the Jewish community and that one of the best ways Jews in the U.S. can help Israelis is by sharing these stories.
“You’re helping by coming here and listening to our stories,” Tibber said. “What we saw with our own eyes, you can share with your friends and family by telling this firsthand story. It’s a real story, not something you heard secondhand from somebody that heard it from somebody else. We were there.”