One year after a terrorist shot Michal Elon three times at close range as she was treating a wounded soldier, the nurse is still pondering the impacts of that day on her work and home life.

October 7 found Elon and her husband, Rabbi Omri Elon, and eight of their 10 children on the Zikim training base five miles south of Ashkelon, close to the Mediterranean Sea and just two miles north of the Gaza Strip. The base rabbi had asked the Elons to lead services and provide holiday cheer for Simchat Torah, something the couple had volunteered to do previously on other Israel Defense Forces bases. After deliberating about the offer, Michal Elon decided that spending Simchat Torah with the soldiers would be a meaningful way to cap the Sukkot week, which the family had spent mostly at home in Kochav Hashachar, a tiny town in the rocky center of the country overlooking the Jordan Valley.

“I even convinced the teenagers to come,” recalled Elon, an affable 45-year-old, her hair covered in a swirling purple headscarf.

So popular with the soldiers were the Friday night prayer services, Simchat Torah dancing and festive meal that many stayed awake after dinner to hear Rabbi Elon’s talk about the Yom Kippur War, the 50-year anniversary of which was being marked throughout Israel.

At 6:29 on Saturday morning, air raid sirens blasted as an intense barrage of around 3,000 rockets began striking Israel from nearby Gaza. A soldier rushed to herd the Elons, still in their bunks, into the aboveground concrete shelter, called a migunit. Soon, amid the rocket attacks, word came that Noa Zeevi, a soldier at Zikim, was seriously injured.

“I’m a nurse, and I offered to help,” Elon said. “I wasn’t afraid for myself leaving the shelter. No one imagined the magnitude of the attack. Even then, we assumed Noa had fallen from a watch tower. We didn’t know that the terrorists were already on the base.”

Attack boats manned by Hamas terrorists from Gaza had landed on the neighboring Zikim beach. The Israeli navy fought back most of them, but 11 terrorists got through. One had shot Zeevi, wounding her in the head.

Elon had left the shelter and was caring for Zeevi when a terrorist shot the soldier guarding them. He died in front of her. The terrorist, disguised as an IDF soldier, looked Elon in the eye and shot her in the stomach and left arm.

Elon and Zeevi would meet again at Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem, where both underwent complex and ultimately successful surgeries. Coincidentally, the two women knew the Hadassah Medical Organization well. Elon graduated from the Henrietta Szold Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Nursing, and she had worked for 10 years in the pediatric oncology department at Hadassah Ein Kerem. Zeevi’s father, Dr. Itai Zeevi, is a maxillofacial surgeon at the HMO.

Their story is one of many where heroism and tragedy on Israel’s battlefields are paralleled by resourcefulness and ingenuity in Hadassah’s hallways, and where patients find surprising connections within the Hadassah family.

Both Elon and Zeevi, after long hospitalizations, are still undergoing rehabilitation. Elon, who now works part time as a regional home nursing director for a health fund, travels 40 minutes from her home to Jerusalem twice a week to continue physical, occupational and aqua therapy at the new Gandel Rehabilitation Center at Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus, which opened in January. Her greatest challenge is regaining full use of her left arm.

At the Gandel center, she sometimes encounters her brother-in-law, Yotam Elon, a teacher, who was shot in the neck while fighting in Gaza and still needs rehabilitative care. Sometimes she has coffee with her twin sister, Yael Weissman, who works as a midwife in the Rady Mother and Child Center at Mount Scopus.

“We’ve experienced a lot of miracles,” Elon said. “Even more than getting shot myself, my worst nightmares are about seeing the soldier die near me. Considering what we know happened to so many others on the Gaza border, I am so thankful that my family emerged whole.”

When she first came home, she could do little by herself. “My husband and the children had to do everything,” she said. “I’m glad to release them from that responsibility now, and to spend more downtime at home. It’s making me think of restructuring my life so I have more simple downtime.”

Dr. Sheer Shabat is one of the rehabilitation physicians who has been treating Elon. Dr. Shabat also had been vacationing on that fateful Simchat Torah. Along with her husband, Ori Shabat, and their two children, Dr. Shabat was at a kibbutz guest house in northern Israel. As soon as news of the Hamas attack broke, they began driving south with Dr. Shabat at the wheel. Ori, a strategic planner for the national water company, also serves as an infantry company commander in a Gaza division unit. For the three hours until they reached their home in Kibbutz Ma’ale HaHamisha near Jerusalem, he fielded alarming and desperate calls from IDF contacts.

“Our children are 7 and 4, but they could tell something bad was going on,” Dr. Shabat recalled. Once home, her husband dressed quickly in his uniform, grabbed his military gear and kissed his family goodbye.

He wasn’t Dr. Shabat’s only family member fighting in Gaza. Her first cousin, Staff Sgt. Itamar Ben-Yehuda, 21, a Golani army medic, was also on the front lines. And Dr. Shabat’s older sister, Lt. Col. Or Ben-Yehuda, is the commander of the 500-strong Caracal Infantry Battalion that patrols the border with Egypt. The mixed-gender combat battalion includes an all-women’s tank unit.

Dr. Shabat phoned the hospital to find out what was happening. More than 100 war-wounded soldiers and civilians arrived at HMO by ambulance and helicopter those first few days; in the following months, an additional 700 would be treated at Hadassah’s two hospitals. One week after the war began, Dr. Shabat’s cousin Itamar, with whom she was very close, was named among the dead in the battle at Kibbutz Nahal Oz.

“As the time went on, my children came to me and asked if their daddy was dead, too,” she said, as her husband had been away for weeks and had not called, since cell phones were initially prohibited among those on active duty in Gaza. “He had to come all the distance from Gaza for one hour just to prove that he was alive.”

“There was no contact from my fighting family,” Dr. Shabat recalled. “Some of the wounded soldiers for whom I was caring served together with my husband. The strain was very great.”

Word came back that Dr. Shabat’s sister and her Caracal soldiers had joined the battles on October 7, supporting the thin line of soldiers along the Gaza border. The female tank crew had neutralized 100 terrorists.

And one of the hospitalized soldiers Dr. Shabat was caring for had met her sister.

On October 7, Staff Sgt. Amit Kazari, a handsome, dark-haired squad commander, remembered waking up before dawn on the Sufa base feeling exuberant. This was supposed to be the 21-year-old’s last Shabbat of compulsory service.

But then the sky began raining rockets, “purple rain” in military speak. By 7 a.m., Kazari found himself running to fetch arms and ammunition as his squad was fighting waves of terrorists. Outnumbered, the soldiers made a stand in the mess hall. They were taking heavy losses when reinforcements arrived: Lt. Col. Ben-Yehuda and her Caracal troops. Kazari remembered shrieking for urgent medical help for one of his soldiers. When Ben-Yehuda wouldn’t assign a medic to the soldier, Kazari besieged her with angry curses. But the lieutenant colonel recognized what Kazari didn’t want to accept: His soldier was already dead.

Kazari himself was shot in the arm and the head. He received life-saving treatment at Hadassah Ein Kerem, and then was transferred for rehabilitation to Mount Scopus. When his doctor, none other than Dr. Shabat, was absent one day, Kazari was told she was home with her children because her husband was serving in Gaza. “Couldn’t her parents help?” Kazari asked a staff member.

But her parents—Dr. Dina Ben-Yehuda, a hematologist and dean of the Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Medicine, and Dr. Arie Ben-Yehuda, the former head of internal medicine at HMO—were already busy. They were caring for the children of Dr. Shabat’s sister, whom he soon found out was the commander of the Caracal unit that had saved him and his squad.

Kazari then realized he had been rescued by one sister and now was being treated by the other.

When weeks later, Ben-Yehuda managed to visit her sister at work in the hospital, Kazari met both sisters and apologized to Ben-Yehuda for his expletives. “She said to me, ‘No hard feelings,’ ” Kazari recalled. “ ‘I’m glad to see that you’re flourishing under my sister’s care.’ ”

“I know every story, and every soldier I’ve met is a hero,” Dr. Shabat said. “I’m privileged to be part of their process of healing.”

Dr. Shabat was able to share some of those stories of healing at Hadassah’s National Conference, held in July this year in Las Vegas, which she attended as part of an HMO delegation. Also with the group was Shlomo Demma, an IDF medic with the tank corps infantry who had been severely injured in Gaza. He came with his twin brother, Samuel.

At a major donors’ event at Las Vegas’s Mob Museum, Dr. Shabat talked about personally treating between 150 and 200 patients at the Gandel center since the beginning of the war. “We have faced unprecedented challenges dealing with each of these brave individuals,” she said at the event. “And we have witnessed great resilience and recovery. It gave us a lot of strength to treat Shlomo and other patients like him.”

Demma recounted how a Hamas squad opened heavy fire on his IDF unit near Jabalya in Gaza. An IED exploded close to him, causing a nearby wall to collapse. “At that moment, I saw black,” he said. “I thought I was dead.” When he came to, he realized that he had been shot in both legs and arms and was trapped under the wall. “I had all the equipment for medical care, but I could not reach it.”

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Members of his unit rushed to help, pulling him from beneath the wall, but they struggled with applying tourniquets. Demma had to calm them down and talk them through placing them on his limbs. “I was afraid I would lose an arm if they did it wrong,” he said. After he was evacuated, an evaluating doctor told him that he had also been shot in the chest, his lungs had collapsed and there was shrapnel in his head, neck and back. “I looked at the doctor and asked, ‘Am I going to die or be handicapped for life?’ ”

Demma underwent extensive surgery at Hadassah Ein Kerem before being transferred to Mount Scopus for rehabilitation. Initially unable to move, he can now walk, move his limbs and drive a car, though he still goes to Mount Scopus three times a week for ongoing treatment. He noted both how lucky he is to be alive and the care he received at Hadassah, calling Dr. Shabat “an angel in rehabilitation.”

Dr. Shabat acknowledges that it has been a tragic, difficult year. “Thankfully, my husband, who has returned home from the battlefield, and my sister in the field are unharmed,” she said. “I’m still mourning my cousin.”

“It’s thrilling to accompany the soldiers who are regaining the ability to walk, to use their hands and arms to pick up their newborn babies,” she added. “As they heal, I feel more confident day by day about our future.” 

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Barbara Sofer, an award-winning journalist and author, is Israel director of public relations for Hadassah.