A registered nurse and mother of 10 was treated at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem last week after risking her life to save an army soldier.
Michal Alon had spent the night on an army base with her husband and eight of her children to bring Simchat Torah programming to the soldiers. She awoke early that Saturday morning to a loud booming sound, and sirens soon followed.
Michal huddled with her family in a sheltered area, until word came that a female soldier outside the door needed assistance.
“I didn’t have a doubt, I didn’t think about it. It was obvious that I would go and see if I can do something,” said Michal, who graduated from the Henrietta Szold Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Nursing and spent years working as a pediatric oncology nurse before becoming a regional nurse.
It quickly became clear that the woman had a serious head wound and needed to lie down. Michal ushered her into a nearby structure, with another soldier standing guard. She began looking for supplies to clean the woman’s wounds when she heard the sound of gunshots. She turned and watched the soldier in the doorway fall to the floor.
“He was shot, and he fell into the room, and he couldn’t breathe, and the soldier is asking, ‘Can we help him?’ I said, ‘I don’t think so because his head was shot, he was full of blood.’ We looked at each other, we didn’t know what to do,” she said.
A second later, another soldier appeared.
“I thought he came to help, but when I looked closer, I saw that something was different. He wasn’t young like all the soldiers and he looked me in the eye and in a second he pulled out his gun and he shot me,” she said.
It wasn’t a soldier at all, she realized, removing her head covering to use it as a tourniquet for the wound on her hand. It had been a terrorist wearing an Israeli uniform.
She stumbled back toward the shelter, where the rest of her family remained. She waited three hours, her husband applying pressure to her wounds, before a military ambulance arrived.
She was evacuated to one hospital, and then another, and then ultimately to Hadassah Ein Kerem to treat her complex injuries. She was extremely relieved to find that the injured soldier she had attempted to save had been transported there too, and her condition was improving.
“She’s alive and she’s here,” Michal said, visibly relieved, speaking from the fifth floor of the Sarah Wetsman Davidson Hospital Tower at Hadassah Ein Kerem, her arm in a sling.
Michal was expected to soon be transferred to Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus, where her twin sister works as a midwife, for rehabilitation.
Watch Hadassah's Oct. 19 live briefing to hear Michal tell her story