‘You Saved Me, Like I Saved Them’: MDA Paramedic Recounts 600 Days of Lifesaving on the Frontlines
‘You Saved Me, Like I Saved Them’: MDA Paramedic Recounts 600 Days of Lifesaving on the Frontlines
For Magen David Adom (MDA) paramedic Alisa Krant, the past 600 days since October 7, 2023 have been the most challenging professionally and mentally. Yet, she has been able to return to the field and continue working, in a demonstration of incredible resilience.
For Krant, 23, October 7 began at 6:30 a.m. with sirens in her hometown of Ashkelon. Within the hour, she set out in a mobile intensive care unit to treat those wounded from rocket attacks—the first step in what would become an intense and unrelenting stretch of lifesaving work in southern Israel.
“People ask me all the time ‘How did you do it?’ But how could I not do it,” Krant reflects on the horrors of that day and the duress of the past 600 days as a paramedic.
Driving through the frontlines of chaos, Krant and her team put their own lives in peril traveling during the initial hours of the invasion to evacuate the wounded from several of the hard-hit communities near the Gaza border, including Zikim, Yad Mordechai, and Shuva.
After transferring several individuals under fire to Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, Krant and her team went to help manage the field hospital at Kochav Michael, where many of the injured had been directed.
One of her patients there was police officer Rami Cohen, who was shot by terrorists near Sderot’s overtaken police station after he saved the lives of two little girls hiding in a blanket, after their parents Dolev and Odaya Swisa had been murdered in front of them.
Cohen arrived in a bulletproof ambulance, where Krant stabilized him during a harrowing 20-minute ride to the hospital. During the journey, he drifted in and out of consciousness, leading Krant to perform a thoracentesis to open the airways in his chest.
When he came to, he gripped her hand and said: “You saved me, like I saved them [the girls].”
Later, in Netivot, she helped convert a bus evacuating civilians into an emergency triage point for the injured. By the time she returned from the field that night, she had treated dozens of wounded, ending her shift at 10:00 p.m.
“There was no time to rest, no time to feel anything,” she recalled. “It hit me only when I got home later that night.”
When reflecting on the courage and composure it took to endure those grueling hours, she said it wasn’t thought through—it was instinctive.
“It was just obvious that this was what I’d trained for, and I’d do it again,” said Krant, who’s been with MDA for 10 years.
During a rare break in the weeks that followed, she had an emotional reunion with Cohen as he was rehabilitating. Now, they are in touch every Friday, and Krant regularly spends time with Cohen and his family.
Her mantra throughout, invoked also by several hostages and other survivors of October 7: “When you have a why, you can bear any how.”
Now back at her regular duty at MDA, where she oversees the outstanding responders program, she reflects on the emotional toll of the war. She credits her family, friends, and MDA’s mental health support system with helping her cope.
“For me, returning to work wasn’t hard,” she says. “Going back to the sites of the attacks was.”
She says for herself, like many of her colleagues who were on duty that day, the bond of surviving such trauma can only be understood by others who experienced it too.
Currently completing her bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, she continues to serve as a leader and mentor for the next generation of MDA responders.
“We’re still on high alert. Without MDA in the field on October 7—and every day since—the Israeli medical system wouldn’t have functioned.”
While over three dozen of her MDA colleagues have lost their lives since October 7, she remains resolute in spite of the emotional challenges. “I survived. I’m proud of what we did. And I’ll keep showing up.” n
