Roni Klein, a dispatcher at the Magen David Adom (MDA) call center, finished his shift and was going to return home at the moment when the murderous terrorist attack by Hamas began.
"Just before the end of the shift, I came to clean up my desk and barrages started towards the south. We received calls about rocket strikes near houses and inside houses, and then talks about terrorist attacks began," Klein recalls in a conversation with Israel National News - Arutz Sheva.
According to him, "The first call I received was about terrorists who were near the Sderot station. I didn't believe it at first, but of course, I sent the appropriate forces and then an unimaginable sequence of attacks began."
In the next few minutes Klein received a call from a man who told about two children whose parents were murdered in front of their eyes and they are hiding in Kfar Aza.
"I called them," he said. "A boy answered and actually told me how their parents were murdered and that he and his sister were hiding in a closet. I instructed them on what to do and how to proceed. I took more details to understand if there were any more casualties. The eight-year-old children kept their cool and functioned excellently, and this is a conversation that I will never forget. It took a very long time to reach them."
The calls received at the center, he says, in many cases required other life-saving skills that are not specifically related to the training of MDA personnel.
"It was very difficult for me to understand what I was facing," he said. "It felt like it was all a nightmare. I'm talking to people on the phone and then I hear voices in Arabic and then the sounds of gunfire. I coached people on how to escape and leave their loved ones who were shot and killed to keep themselves alive. These are things we are not familiar with and we faced a completely different situation. Some of these things are difficult for me to grasp even now."