Magen David Adom in Israel Provides Humanitarian Relief Around the World
Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel's equivalent of the American Red Cross, specializes in emergency disaster relief and is fully equipped with ambulances and mobile intensive care units. MDA has its own blood bank, operates public first-aid stations throughout the country and conducts basic first aid training. Less publicized are the tracing services that reunite missing family members and loved ones. With 12 regional stations and a staff of 9,000 volunteers and employees, this relief society is highly developed and carries out many activities within Israel's borders. But MDA also responds to disasters worldwide. Since 1990, MDA has launched numerous disaster relief efforts in Africa, Asia and Europe.
During 1999 and 2000, alone, MDA volunteers and staff responded to disasters in Greece, Kosovo, Turkey, Indonesia, Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the face of drought and conflict, MDA has aided the hungry and the displaced in Eritrea and in Ethiopia. During 2000, MDA and the American Red Cross airlifted food and basic medical equipment to help Eritrean refugees. In response to the drought affecting millions of people in Ethiopia and throughout the Horn of Africa, Magen David Adom is cooperating in a joint venture with the American Red Cross and the Ethiopian Red Cross. MDA has provided food, soap and medicines to the famine relief effort. In May, 2000, three MDA staff members and 50 tons of relief cargo left Ben Gurion International Airport bound for Ethiopia to help hungry children and adults.
Following a devastating earthquake in August 1999, Israeli paramedics went to Turkey to aid in search and rescue efforts. Some of the MDA paramedics participated in rescue missions, while others cared for wounded victims at a field hospital. From the site, MDA paramedics sent daily reports of horror, despair and miracles. On the word of an excited boy and girl who said they heard knocking sounds deep within a pile of rubble, one paramedic used his stethoscope to locate the person underground. He dug a small hole toward the noise. At first two fingers and then an entire hand emerged, allowing the paramedic to insert an intravenous transfusion which helped to keep the victim alive for the eight hours it took to free him.
Twenty-one days later, many of the same paramedics who had worked in Turkey went to Greece when an earthquake registering 5.9 on the Richter occurred near Athens. Assigned to remove the remains of a five-floor factory, the team started work, hoping to save lives. It was not long before they realized there was not much medical work to be done, there were only corpses among the rubble. Still, MDA paramedics worked 12-hour to 14-hour shifts for three consecutive days, until all the bodies amidst the debris were uncovered.
In Kosovo in 1999, at the request of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, MDA conducted an expert assessment on the reorganization and function of the Blood Services operation there. They dispatched a blood bank supervisor to provide technical assistance and aid in rebuilding Blood Services capability in the region. MDA supported several refugee relief programs during the year, including paramedics, mobile field hospitals, blood units and clothing donations.
When Indonesia's Jakarta Blood Center was destroyed in a fire during the winter of 1999, Bali was among those areas cut off from blood-related products. The Rotary Clubs of Bali sent an emergency request for blood-related products to Israel. Magen David Adom Blood Services responded to the disaster by sending 2,400 empty single blood bags and 55 bottles of serum used to detect Hepatitis C and B.
Humanitarian Cooperation Transcends Middle East Political Conflicts
Magen David Adom (MDA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, the Red Cross equivalents in Israel and Palestine, respectively, have an extremely high level of cooperation, despite the political tensions currently existing in the Middle East.
"It has nothing to do with politics," says Dr. Moshe Mellul, president of MDA. "We live together, and we need to help each other."
MDA provides training for Palestinian medics and ambulance drivers, and there is talk now of using Israeli expertise to develop a blood bank for the Palestinian society. The first official meeting between the humanitarian groups was held in 1997, when MDA president Prof. Shlomi Antebbe met with Palestinian Red Crescent Society president Dr. Fathi Arafat, the brother of Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat. At that time, MDA pledged to help the Palestinian group develop its resources, and the Palestinian organization agreed to help secure MDA's status as a full member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
According to Fayeq Huessein, deputy general manager of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, ambulances from both organizations often respond to the scene of accidents, and the medical personnel treat all those in need, regardless of nationality. He said that many of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank have their own ambulances, and often respond to Palestinians in need. Even during the Intifada, the uprising against Israelis in the Palestinian occupied territories from 1987 to 1993, Palestinian medics treated Israeli soldiers injured on the street.
"There were times when they were lying there with their weapons in the street, and we could have scooped them up, but we never did. We collected them and returned them to the soldiers," he said.
MDA was organized by seven Israeli doctors in 1930 as a shoestring, one-room emergency medical service. A second MDA group formed in Haifa in 1931 and a third in Jerusalem in 1934. By 1935, a national organization was formed to provide medical services to the public and the Hagana, the military arm of pre-state Israel. Since 1950, MDA has been responsible for providing auxiliary service to Israel's Army Medical Corps in wartime, providing civilian emergency medical and first-aid services and maintaining a blood bank for civilian use.
MDA administers 52 first aid stations that operate 24-hours a day, as well as approximately 580 ambulances, of which 260 are posted in kibbutzim, large public enterprises, isolated border settlements and Jewish settlements in the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria. The MDA blood services center processes nearly 90 percent of the country's civilian blood requirements as well as all the blood needs of the Israel Defense Forces.
The Palestine Red Crescent Society was founded in 1968 to meet the health and welfare needs of approximately seven million Palestinians living in both territories of Israel and in neighboring countries. The society currently functions primarily as a national first aid society, but until the Palestine Liberation Organziation became the Palestinian National Authority in 1992, with the signing of the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian society functioned as the Ministry of Health for Palestine. Today, it is the largest Arab Red Crescent Society in the world, with more than 70 hospitals, 300 clinics and scores of health and social welfare centers.
To read more about Magen David Adom emergency, medical, health, blood and disaster services, go to http://www.magendavidadom.org on the Internet.
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