MDA israel

The words on the dispatch screen were brief: a worker had fallen approximately three and a half meters into a pit.

For MDA EMT and ambulance driver Anas Al-Asam, they were enough. “I saw the description and immediately knew it was my brother.”

Only hours earlier, the brothers had made plans to meet for lunch. Anas was working his regular shift at the Hura station, while his brother was working nearby. Then, at 2:30 p.m., Anas was dispatched to a serious fall in the area where his brother was working.

He raced toward the scene, forcing himself not to call him.

When he arrived and looked into the pit, his fear was confirmed. His brother was lying below. “He called out to me, ‘I feel like something in my back is broken. I can't move,’” Anas recalled.

For the 25-year-old EMT, years of training suddenly collided with something deeply personal. The person who needed him was not a stranger. It was his own brother.

Anas descended into the pit, assessed his injuries and stayed beside him while more responders arrived. By the time they reached the top, another familiar face was there: their brother, a senior MDA EMT and MICU driver who had come directly from home to help.

For the Al-Asam family, perhaps that should not be surprising. Twenty-one members of his extended family serve with Magen David Adom, including his brothers, nephew and several cousins.

Anas, however, insists his own path to MDA was never simply about following his family. He dreamed of emergency medicine since childhood. At 18, he paid for an MDA EMT course and began volunteering, sometimes completing 200 hours in a single month.

Five years later, Anas has experienced both the extraordinary responsibility and unpredictability that come with wearing the MDA uniform.

Sometimes, that means finding your own brother at the bottom of a pit. Other times, it means being present for the first minutes of someone's life.

Last week, Anas was called to help a 24-year-old woman in labor with her fourth child. After assessing her condition, he began an urgent evacuation to the hospital.

They had traveled only about a kilometer when he heard the volunteers in the back of the ambulance call to him: “Anas, listen, the head is out.”

There was no time to reach the hospital.

Anas pulled over safely and began preparing for the delivery. Moments later, inside the ambulance, a baby girl was born. The newborn was not crying at first, so Anas began stimulating her and clearing her airway. A few moments later came the sound the team had been waiting for: her first cry.

The team cut the umbilical cord, cleaned and wrapped the newborn and continued caring for mother and baby.

The mother asked a simple question: Was it a boy or a girl?

When Anas told her it was a girl, she began to cry. “She told us this was her first daughter after three boys,” Anas said.

It was Anas's first time delivering a baby inside an ambulance. For someone who has responded to serious injuries and some of the most difficult scenes imaginable, it was a reminder of another side of emergency medicine.

MDA's teams are present in moments of fear, uncertainty and loss, but they are also there in the moments when life begins.

For Anas, that contrast is why he and his family members wear the MDA uniform with such pride. “I want EMTs to remember that this isn't an ordinary role,” he said. “It is a role of saving lives and bringing lives into the world. Do not be afraid. Be strong and keep saving lives.”

For the Al-Asam family, those words are more than advice. With 21 relatives already part of MDA, saving lives has become a family tradition: one generation, one call and sometimes even one family member at a time.