A Israeli ambulance who spent hours transporting the victims of the Hamas attack to the hospital likened what he saw to a “horror movie” that will require treatment for post-traumatic stress. Ari Yonatan, 32, a native of New York, was called along with his colleagues on the morning of October 7 to treat and transport the wounded from the coordinated attack launched by Hamas that ultimately claimed the lives of more than 1,400 people in Israel.
The wounded man and father of four was among the dead and wounded along the Gaza border. “When I got to the hospital with my wounded, it really felt like we were shooting a horror movie. Everyone was screaming, there was chaos and everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. I just stood there, numb. If you were there, your mind, your soul would be greatly damaged by the images of horror. I know that my own soul is suffering,” he told New York Post.
The nightmare for Yonatan began around 6 a.m. when, instead of waking up to celebrate Sukkot, he heard rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. While the sound was nothing out of the ordinary, Yonatan knew something was wrong when the rockets started firing more frequently and from his balcony he could see towns near Gaza covered in smoke.
He quickly called his superiors to let them know he could volunteer during the holidays if they needed him. “I was told that there were dead and wounded everywhere, that we had 300 calls and everyone needed to come to the hospital,” he says. Yonatan went to Kibbutz Ofakim, but before he got there, he was warned that he was under fire. It eventually headed north to Netivot, where it parked next to the town’s entrance to pick up civilians, police and Israeli soldiers bearing gunshot wounds. Jonathan describes hearing gunshots, rockets flying overhead and sirens everywhere. Once he arrived at the hospital, he learned about the situation in his country.
“Hamas he had massacred hundreds, burning people alive, cutting off their heads, raping women and taking hostages. All day we watched this terrible carnage. I would go to the shooting scenes, go to the hospitals and then come back. That was very harsh,” he said.
Jonathan later learned that many of his friends were among the dead in the attack, including three of his colleagues. The first was the Aharon Haimov, 25 years old, father of two who drove ambulances for Magen David Adom. Jonathan described his friend as a man with a “heart of gold” who lit up the room with his smile.
The second was Amit Mann, 22 years old, a nurse who worked with Yonatan and was in a clinic when the terrorists stormed in and killed them all. “He was in the clinic treating patients until the last minute and they were killed in cold blood,” Yonatan said.
The third was Aviya Hazroni, 69, who was fondly called the station’s “grandpa.” Hazroni, who always liked to share stories with all emergency workers, was shot by point-blank range while he was outside trying to rescue the wounded.
The murder of a pregnant woman at the festival
As he witnessed the horror, Yonatan said one of the stories that stuck in his mind was the massacre at the Nova music festival in the desert, where one of the survivors he rescued told him of the murder of a pregnant Arab woman. “She spoke to them in Arabic to beg for her life and they told her she was a traitor for being with Israel. Then they shot her in the stomach and killed her,” he said.
There is no place in this world for Hamas
“These are people who have lost all sense of humanity. What happened on October 7th was a horror on a scale our community has not experienced since the Holocaust. What we are fighting today is a mix of Nazis and ISIS terrorists. This is the opponent we have to face,” says Yonatan.
While this day will forever be etched in Yonatan’s memory, he said he sees some hope in the way Israel has come together to destroy Hamas. With Israelis enlisting en masse in the IDF and emergency services, Yonatan said his greatest hope would be to see the end of the terror group so that future generations would be spared the horrors it experienced. “We must exterminate them,” he said of Hamas. “It’s something that has to be done 100%. There is no place in this world for Hamas.”
Source: News Beast
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