Volunteers from the US organization Community Search And Rescue (CommSAR) have joined the effort to find those still unaccounted for after the Hamas invasion of Israel on Simchat Torah. CommSAR is a non-profit and all-volunteer organization dedicated to providing law enforcement and park management with highly trained ground searchers and incident management resources in the USA's New York and New Jersey areas.
The newly-arrived volunteers have already begun working and are operating embedded with the Israel Dog Unit (IDU) teams searching near the Gaza border. The IDU is a nonprofit specializing in search and rescue and locating missing persons, and has been assisting the IDF in the still-growing task of recovering those missing since the invasion.
Along with the volunteers, the delegation brings with it medical supplies and other equipment to bolster the search teams' strained resources.
IDU director Yekutiel Ben-Yaakov commented on the CommSAR delegation's arrival: "Baruch Habah - welcome to Israel, you are clearly good Jews and part of a special unit. You are joining us in a war zone and willing to search for missing people under fire. The people of Israel thank you for the much-needed equipment and for your dedication and self-sacrifice on behalf of the people of Israel."
Aaron, a CommSAR volunteer who is also a paramedic, commented: "I come from Monsey, New York. I work with CommSAR over there. We've come over here to help the Israel Dog Unit with the search and rescue efforts near the parking lot where the rave took place." One of the first actions by Hamas forces after breaking through the border fortifications was to surround a music festival, or rave, near one of the breaches and attack the participants.
"The other team with CommSAR is somewhere out in the field. We're here to help. I could not sit back and watch the carnage in Israel without doing my share to try and rescue my missing brothers and sisters, or at least to recover the bodies of others who were injured fleeing the terrorists' fire."