Yisrael Feldman Does a Jameelie

Yisrael Feldman went up north to do a Jameelie

(that's Yisrael racing off to Acco [Acre for all you Crusaders out there])

[For the definition of a Jameelie, go here]

It definitely was not a quiet Tisha ba'av.

For the first 12 hours we were filling in for the regular ambulance teams around the Kiryat Motzkin area, north of Haifa. During the 7pm to 7am shift my ambulance had 3 calls. There were 4 ambulances on duty. I could never have imagined how much our being there would help the regular ambulance teams. These guys have been working 12 hours on and 12 hours off for 3 weeks! Whenever a volunteer driver arrives, the local teams are able to get a little bit of an extra break. They were unbelievably appreciative.

For the 7am to 7pm shift we were one of the three units in the Immediate Emergency Response Team that only goes out in case of missile attacks. At around 3pm the sirens sounded and we had to go into the shelter until cleared to go out by dispatch. They called out our unit to acco, where a rocket had landed in a residential area; a 10 minute drive from us. We could hear the thuds of missiles landing on the way! You would be surprised how much traffic was heading north with us.

As we approached the location of the attack in Acco, they called us into the local station (a block away), as a second rocket had hit the same spot and this is the one that caused most of the fatalities. We were held back at the station for about 20 minutes and then released when it was safe to take shock victims to the hospital in Nahariya.

Another Hashmonaim driver was returning from a regular ambulance call from Nahariya when he saw the smoke of the landed rocket. He called in that he was going in to help. He was one of the first on the scene and took 5 people to the hospital at once!

Two brothers of a local ambulance dispatcher were killed in the attack and she was wounded.

We returned last night. There were six ambulance drivers from Hashmonaim who volunteered to help out.

I'm proud to know Yisrael.
Also Jameelie, in a cyber sense.