Thousands of Israelis treated for injuries on Yom Kippur

Israel's emergency medical services were kept busy on the day of fast, as thousands of Israelis were involved in road incidents or suffered from health issues due to the fast.

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Updated: OCTOBER 1, 2017 01:40
An Israeli boy rides his bike on an empty motorway during Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv (photo credit: REUTERS)
An Israeli boy rides his bike on an empty motorway during Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Despite the cool weather, Magen David Adom treated 2,229 people during the Yom Kippur fast; the figure for the holiday last year was 2,326. A total of 228 people suffered fainting or dehydration.
Others who needed help were children and adults who were hurt in road or cycling accidents or had other injuries. A total of 1,355 people had to be evacuated by ambulance to hospitals for further treatment.
MDA teams were called to transfer 134 pregnant women in labor to hospitals, while seven women were delivered by MDA paramedics and paramedics in their homes and ambulances in the cities of Majdal Shams, Kalansuwa, Modi’in, Petah Tikva, Karmiel, Jerusalem and Bnei Brak.
Among the many injuries were those due to cycling, electric bicycles, skates, skateboards, roller skates and scooters. Some of them were evacuated to hospitals around the country, including a nineyear- old boy who crashed into a wall while riding a bicycle in Gan Yavne and was evacuated in moderate condition and suffering from a facial injury to Kaplan Medical Center in Rehovot. A man aged about 50 who fell from his bicycle in Tel Aviv and suffered medium injuries from head trauma was taken to the city’s Sourasky Medical Center.
Ambulance teams were also called to treat 24 persons injured in violent incidents, including a 33-year-old man who was stabbed in his upper body in Kamanneh village and evacuated to Western Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya.
This year, there were two incidents of stone throwing and disruption of MDA ambulances by children and youth in the cities of Ashdod and Acre; the attackers were not ultra-Orthodox.
Other unusual events involved a Negev boy who fell from a horse on Friday; he was taken to Soroka-University Medical Center in Beersheba.
On Shabbat, in the Lachish area, a 27-year-old man from abroad was pulled unconscious from the sea off Ashkelon National Park; he was declared dead.
During the day of Yom Kippur, MDA Blood Services provided hospitals throughout the country with 62 pints of blood and blood components. The organization calls on the public to donate blood of all types, and especially type O and negative Rh of all types (O-, A-, B-, and AB-). Information about blood donation stations can be found on the MDA website at www.mdais.org/dam.
Meanwhile, the police reported several criminal incidents over Yom Kippur, including one in which a youth was assaulted close to a mall in the Jerusalem suburb of Pisgat Ze’ev by several other youths and had his electric bicycle stolen.
In a separate incident, stones were thrown at a car at the Pat junction in southern Jerusalem damaging the windscreen, but no one was injured.
A fire broke out in an apartment in the capital’s haredi neighborhood of Mea She’arim but was extinguished by the Fire Service, and a young man was sent to the hospital with light injuries after a fight broke out between two families in the Shuafat refugee neighborhood in northeastern Jerusalem.
Jeremy Sharon contributed to this report.