As Israel rebuilds after more than two years of devastating war with Islamic terror groups, a Christian ministry is helping Israel’s emergency service Magen David Adom to build a vital new medical station near the Lebanese border.
MDA senior paramedic and liaison Aryeh Myers has spoken with PJ Media before about the horrors of the Oct. 7 massacre, the tragedies of the ensuing war, and how MDA brings together Israelis of all religious and ethnic backgrounds to provide care in life-and-death crises. Now that there is a period of truce from jihad, Samaritan's Purse is generously donating ambulances and a medical station for a Galilee town previously targeted by Hezbollah. Myers spoke with PJ Media about the station and the constant dangers for northern Israeli residents during the war.
In the unending global sob campaign for Gaza, most people, including too many Westerners, forget that numerous Israeli towns were devastated by Hamas or Hezbollah. In the northern Israeli town of Shlomi, where near-daily Hezbollah attacks displaced some 10,000 residents during the war, Samaritan’s Purse is joining with Magen David Adom to rebuild and prepare for any future crisis (learn more about MDA’s life-saving work here).
Myers told me, "We held a dedication last week laying the foundation stone for a new station up in Shlomi. Shlomi is right on the northern border with Lebanon, obviously strategically very important. It was one of the areas where we had teams who, even though the towns in the area had been …evacuated, we had Magen David Adom teams who remained in Shlomi, and we had to find somewhere safe for them." That was often difficult, hence the plan to build a new station.
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The Shlomi station will be a place where MDA can "remain safe, even under threat. And Samaritan’s Purse, obviously, even right from the start of the war, has actually been supporting Magen David Adom with ambulances, particularly bulletproof or armored ambulances," Myers told me. "We dedicated five of those ambulances at the same ceremony," as when they laid the station cornerstone, he added. "Again, [these are] things that are a part of the preparedness, the resilience of the state of Israel and of Magen David Adom to ensure that we can respond, whatever the situation might be," Myers said.
He told me that, during the post-Oct. 7 war, for any town that was within three or four miles of the border with Lebanon, most civilians "were evacuated for a significant period of time… because they were being pelted with rockets from Hezbollah, so we had to make sure that the civilians were safe." Not all of the civilians did evacuate throughout the war, however, "and there was also a large presence of security forces, and we had... to ensure that they had medical provision as well for any emergencies," Myers continued. If such a crisis occurs again, MDA will use the Shlomi station.
Check back on PJ Media for Myers's more detailed account of how MDA prepares for mass casualty situations, and how it helps victims not only in Israel but around the world.
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