Michael Shamai, 36, was finishing his last working shift as a helicopter medical rescue pilot in the south before his scheduled return home, when he got a Saturday morning call to evacuate two casualties from Kibbutz Revivim, near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip.
Emerging from a bomb shelter in Sde Teiman Airfield, Shamai said he assumed that he and other medics were being called to evacuate injured from the ongoing rocket barrage that morning, “which bothers me less than what actually happened,” he said.
En route, his team discovered the men were injured by gunfire. Shamai’s Sikorsky S-76 helicopter was designed to fly executives in comfort, not to withstand light arms or missile fire. The former Israeli Air Force pilot knew that an armed attack was only one of his team’s challenges, the second being the level of medical care a civilian EMS service could provide versus superior resources attending a military medivac.
Realizing one of the two injured civilians was in critical condition, Shamai radioed to check a time frame for when a military helicopter could arrive. The answer he received, he said, was: “There aren’t any, you’re alone, there’s no military helicopter coming.”
At 11 a.m., after he picked up the wounded, Shamai’s request to land was refused by the nearby Soroka Medical Center, on the grounds that the hospital was “closed because it’s full of injured people and if you land here, there is no one to take care of them.”
On the way to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, one of his injured passengers died.
It was the first of several sorties that Shamai — and two other civilian air evacuation helicopters operated by a private company on behalf of Magen David Adom — flew in the first critical hours of Hamas’s devastating terror attack against Israel, which claimed the lives of some 1,000 people, the vast majority of them civilians, and wounded more than 3,000. In the days since, the toll has swelled to more than 1,300 dead.
Amid confusion and overtaxing demand on military resources, Israel’s tiny fleet of civilian air ambulance services jumped into action to fly military-grade medical rescue missions, beginning from the first hours of the attack, which started at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday.
Israel’s most catastrophic single-day mass casualty event in its 75-year history, Hamas’s terror attack caught security forces by surprise, and it took the Israel Defense Forces critical time to spin up. And even then, an Air Force overwhelmed by the unprecedented number of injured, contending with competing missions, was stretched to provide timely service.
For two days, civilian air ambulance services helped fill the gap, according to Sharon Shiloh, a senior adviser to Brook Aviation, which is the operator for Magen David Adom’s two-helicopter ambulance fleet.
Explaining Brook’s decision to send their air teams to the front lines, former Israeli Air Force pilot Shiloh, 61, said that the private company jumped in to fill a demand gap, not a skills one.
“It’s not inability, [the military] had so many missions,” said Shiloh, who coordinated among Brook, Magen David Adom and the Air Force. “And they have other missions other than medical evacuation missions. There was so much need, we had 3,000 wounded soldiers and civilians.”
Shiloh said that Brook is currently the only civilian medical airlift operator in Israel, and under normal circumstances, one helicopter each in the country’s northern and southern regions is enough to fulfill the mission. Even in peacetime, the military generally flies more complicated cases.
A spokesperson for Magen David Adom did not respond to a request for verification. Hebrew daily The Marker has previously reported that Magen David Adom has not dispatched available medivac helicopters from providers Lahak and United Hatzalah since March 2023, following a lawsuit between Magen David Adom and Lahak.
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