‘As someone who went through October 7 at its ugliest, its most difficult, I never would have thought I would be exposed to such powerful cruelty. It haunts me and will continue to haunt me,” Dr. Sabry El Sayed says during an interview in The Shift (Ha Mishmeret).
El Sayed, the deputy head of the ear, nose and throat department at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, features in this latest episode of the KAN 11 series, Real Time (Zman Emet), which commemorates the third anniversary of the massacre by Hamas and which can be seen on Kan.org.il, as well as on YouTube.
This moving episode, which is good enough to be a standalone hour-long documentary, details what happened that day at Soroka, the hospital that received the lion’s share of the day’s casualties from all locations.
These included the Nova music festival, the military bases, Sderot, Ofakim, the highways, and the kibbutzim. Soroka Medical Center staff treated a staggering 674 people that day. Some they saved, some they couldn’t.
At the same time, many of them worried about the fates of family members who were in places that were attacked and about their staff members who could not make it to work. One member of the staff lost her son, a soldier, in the fighting, and came to the hospital to identify his body.
Soroka doctor recalls colleague killed while treating October 7 victims in Be'eri
El Sayed talks about his concern for his colleague, Dr. Daniel Levy, an ENT resident who lived in Kibbutz Be’eri. When the attack began, Levy’s family stayed in their safe room, but he went to the dental clinic to treat the wounded and was killed.
He and El Sayed stayed in touch throughout most of the morning. The moment El Sayed realizes he has lost his colleague is especially powerful in a series full of them.
Looking at the day’s events through one hospital is brilliant because…