What Israel Does When No One Is Watching
While cameras chase outrage and slogans, Israel’s national emergency service quietly crosses enemy lines, protects blood and babies underground, and saves lives without asking who deserves it.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Mitch Schneider, who writes about Israel, from Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Last week, five ambulances crossed from northern Israel into Syria.
Not tanks, not troops, ambulances — fully equipped and staffed by Israeli Druze paramedics, headed to Druze and Christian villages where hospitals have been bombed and help rarely comes.
In other words, Israel sent medical resources into Syria, a country technically at war with Israel, to save Muslim and Christian lives.
That made headlines. But for Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency service, that was just another Tuesday.
On October 7, 2023, while the world was still trying to understand what was happening, Magen David Adom was already there. First responders, first on scene, running toward gunfire while others ran away.
They treated the wounded under fire. They evacuated bodies with dignity. Some of their volunteers and employees were killed in the line of duty. Magen David Adom teams worked under rocket fire that day and every day since, risking their lives to save others.
In 2025, Magen David Adom responded to 1.38 million emergency calls. That’s one every 7.3 seconds. Their average response time from call to dispatch? Two seconds.
Behind those numbers: 39,200 people, 90 percent volunteers, 6.3 million volunteer hours last year. Jewish paramedics saving Arab lives. Arab paramedics saving Jewish lives. Druze, Christian, Muslim, secular, religious. Magen David Adom responds to everyone.
They operate 1,716 vehicles across Israel including ambulances, mobile intensive care units, emergency motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, “seambulances” for coastal emergencies, five helicopters equipped with advanced intensive care equipment, and 168 stations positioned across the country. They respond to terror attacks and car accidents, rocket strikes and heart attacks, mass casualty events and stroke victims stopped at red lights.
But all of this requires one thing Israel can’t afford to run out of: blood.
In May 2022, Israel opened something that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world: The Marcus National Blood Services Center. It’s a $135-million facility with three floors underground and three floors above ground, built to protect Israel’s most precious resource. Not oil. Not technology. Blood.
The old blood services facility was built in the 1980s. It was a beautiful glass building. Light, modern, completely exposed. During rocket attacks, Magen David Adom had to stop processing blood and move the entire inventory into a bomb shelter that normally functioned as a synagogue. Think about that: When blood is needed most, during war, they couldn’t produce it.
Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, visited that facility during missile attacks. He saw how vulnerable it was. He and his wife Billi donated $35 million to build something better, something that would protect Israel’s blood supply no matter what. The new facility goes 50 feet underground and features three subterranean levels, each one more secure than the last.
The first underground floor has blood bank laboratories, a transportation center, and secure parking for ambulances to load blood safely even during attacks. The second underground floor has the Cord Blood Inventory for stem cell research, an R&D molecular lab, and air-filtration systems that can protect against chemical and biological attacks. If there’s a chemical or biological attack, the staff can keep working and processing blood.
The third level, the deepest level, is the vault: 3,230 square feet, extra-thick concrete walls, blast doors. They are the heaviest, most secure doors in Israel, maybe in the world. Inside that vault is Israel’s strategic inventory of 25,000 blood components. It can withstand a direct ballistic missile strike, chemical attacks, biological attacks, earthquakes, even cyber attacks.
Every critical system has a backup: two ramps into the underground levels, four elevators, four generators powerful enough to run the entire city of Ramla in central Israel with a population of 83,000.
The facility doubled Israel’s blood processing capacity from 270,000 units per year to 540,000. That means tens of thousands more lives saved every year. Every blood transfusion in Israel comes from this facility: soldiers, civilians, cancer patients, surgery patients, terror victims, car accident victims. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you believe. If you need blood in Israel, Magen David Adom provides it. No religion check. No ID verification. Just blood when you need it.
But blood isn’t the only thing the Marcus National Blood Services Center protects. On the second floor, above ground, is something most people have never heard of: The Sussman Family Foundation Human Milk Bank. It’s Israel’s first and only human milk bank.
Every year in Israel, about 200,000 babies are born, 10 percent of whom aren’t full-term. Of those premature babies, about 20 percent are severely underweight and at risk for serious medical conditions that can lead to developmental disabilities or even death. For these babies, breast milk isn’t just food; it’s medicine.
The milk bank collects donations from nursing mothers across Israel. The milk is tested, processed, and pasteurized to the highest safety standards. Then it’s distributed to hospitals for premature and medically fragile infants.
On October 7th, the milk bank didn’t stop. In the first three weeks after the attack, they provided over 600 liters of breast milk to babies whose mothers were murdered, abducted, injured, or deployed to military duty.
Before October 7th, the milk bank had 750 registered donors. When the war started, 200 mothers immediately signed up to donate. Another 700 joined the waiting list for approval. The milk bank doubled its capacity in 2022 after moving to the Marcus National Blood Services Center.
Think about what that means: In the middle of war, while rockets were falling, mothers were donating milk for babies they’d never meet, and Magen David Adom was collecting, testing, and distributing it to hospitals, saving the most vulnerable lives. And this work doesn’t stop at Israel’s borders.
A few weeks ago, Magen David Adom partnered with Samaritan’s Purse (a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization providing spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world) to lay the foundation stone for a new medical station in Shlomi, right on the Israel–Lebanon border. The town was pounded by Hezbollah rockets for months after October 7th; 10,000 residents were evacuated. Even when the town was empty, Magen David Adom teams stayed. They had to find safe places to work because they knew if another attack came, they’d need to be there.
Samaritan’s Purse donated five bulletproof ambulances at the same ceremony. When the new station is complete, Magen David Adom will be able to operate safely even under fire. That’s a Christian organization partnering with Israel’s emergency service to save lives on a border that’s been a warzone.
Magen David Adom is also training 17 young Druze men from Syria to become firefighters, including professional instruction, equipment, and a new fire engine. The goal is to establish a fire station in the Druze region of southern Syria. These aren’t PR stunts. This is what MDA does. They see people who need help, and they help.
Right now, with tensions rising with Iran, Israel’s Health Ministry has put private ambulances on standby nationwide through June. Magen David Adom’s network will be supplemented if needed — because they’re always preparing for the worst while hoping for the best.
Magen David Adom isn’t a political organization. It’s not a messaging campaign. It’s not a hashtag. It’s 39,200 people who’ve decided that every life matters, that blood doesn’t have a religion, that a premature baby born to a mother who was abducted by terrorists deserves the same chance as any other baby, that Druze and Christian communities across the border in Syria deserve medical care even though Syria is technically at war with Israel.
They built the world’s first underground fortified blood bank because they know that in war, when you need blood most, you can’t afford to stop producing it. They collect milk from nursing mothers because premature babies can’t wait. They send ambulances into Syria because people are dying and they can save them. They run toward the danger because that’s what they do. And they do all of this without checking your ID, your religion, your politics, or your opinions about Israel.
This is what a society that values life looks like.
Great beautiful piece. The morons who run western governments should read it. They might learn something if they were not so cognitively blind and morally injured. Their constituents who march on behalf of free Palestine, on the other hand, are so stupid I doubt even reading this would make a dent in their sanctimony.
Thank you for sharing the amazing story of Magen David Adom! The services they provide are invaluable! They reflect more broadly on Israeli society as a whole. Israeli society values human life. Their enemies do not value human life. Ever heard of the Israeli NGO Save A Child’s Heart? They help children from all over the globe including Palestinian and Arab children. You can see that in the conduct of the IDF. They drop leaflets, do radio broadcasts, do roof knocking, and call off airstrikes if they see civilians especially children, in the area. The IDF has the lowest combatant to civilian killed ratio in the history of warfare in the Gaza War. Israel treated Syrian children who were sick or hurt. Israel sent humanitarian workers to Turkey after the Earthquake there in 2023. Israel has taken in Syrian children and Ukrainian refugees.
Israelis in Tel Aviv protested to allow African asylum seekers to stay in the country and they succeeded in that. Israel rescued the Yemeni and Ethiopian Jewish communities. Israel welcomed the Black Hebrew Israelites and African-American Christians into the country with open arms. Palestinians can become Israeli citizens and more and more of them are doing so. Women, Arabs, blacks, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and animals are treated exceptionally well in Israel. The Jewish state is a world leader in environmentalism. The IDF has helped in rescuing Yahzidi girls from ISIS. They released hundreds of terrorists including Yahya Sinwar to save a captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. The Israeli government did whatever it took to bring all the hostages living and dead, home.