An Israeli documentary about two Orthodox Jews who defied Shabbat and raced to the scene of the October 7 atrocities in southern Israel despite the imminent danger has captivated the nation and is building a bridge between the country’s secular and orthodox communities. 

The documentary, which aired on Israel’s equivalent of “60 Minutes,” “Ovda,” depicts three members of an Israeli volunteer medical response group, United Hatzalah, who were responsible for saving dozens of lives on October 7th. The film captures the men leaving their homes in Jerusalem that fateful morning and driving headlong into what soon became clear was a full-fledged battlefield. The documentary follows them through the footage from cameras on their ambulance.

The medical technicians, two named Avi and one named Immanuel, joined a stream of emergency vehicles headed to southern Israel around 8 am that morning. Dashcam footage shows a stream of tanks, ambulances, and police cars along their route. 

Around nine in the morning, the men recount that they receive a dispatch telling them to stop because of the danger ahead. While most other ambulances heeded the advice, the trio continued.

When asked about his motivation for disobeying the order to halt their progress, Avi, the driver, explains, “If I go out on Shabbat, I go out to save lives, I don’t go out to wait at the Cheletz junction.” The dispatcher responds, “I understand that you don’t want to come back alive, have a good day,” Immanuel recalls in one interview conducted days later.

As the men drive towards Sderot, their dashcam footage records the scattered bodies of people who had been murdered and dragged out of their cars. They tell a dispatcher that there are hundreds of people in need of evacuation. 

The three men describe how the men and their colleagues from the other major emergency medical service in Israel, Magen David Adom, are overwhelmed by the volume of calls for help. The documentary overlays the dashcam footage of the onslaught with transcripts from calls seeking medical help.

The drivers arrive at the site of an Israeli Moshav, a small farming community, known as Yachini. Despite ongoing fire between the terrorists and Israeli forces, the men attempt to rescue a boy shot twice in the back. Unfortunately, Avi recalls, they arrive too late and the boy is dead.

In the next call, the men go to Sapir College near Sderot where they try to pick up a man who had been shot in the leg. Shortly before they pick him up, however, the car is intercepted by an army unit. A soldier with a serious wound to the head is in need of immediate evacuation. 

As the men head back for the Sapir College residence, they travel along Route 34 and the extent of the tragedy becomes painfully clear. “I look out the window and I get a fever. I just notice that Avi is driving down the road and doing a zigzag between bodies,” one of the EMTs recounts. Their dashcam footage shows heavily burned cars haphazardly stopped on the road.

Eventually, the men decide to go onwards along Route 232, which connects the hardest-hit communities of Kibbutzim Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and other communities on the Gaza periphery. “Nothing prepared us for what we saw on Route 232,” Avi recounts. “Simply hell, you see babies’ strollers thrown on the floor and you see vans of Hamas terrorists.”

The men eventually reach Kfar Aza where they see soldiers who had been killed lying on the floor and their colleagues still engaged with the Hamas terrorists. The EMT drivers load in injured soldiers and drive them to the Cheletz Junction, where the soldiers are evacuated by helicopter. 

The men recount the scene at Kfar Aza to the director of operations for Hatzalah and are joined by an entourage of ambulances there to assist with the evacuation. As they make their way down Route 232, Avi has to convince the other ambulance drivers to continue despite the carnage on the roads around them. 

Ultimately, the drivers’ day ends at the Sderot police station. The ambulance reaches Sderot at nightfall and drops a soldier off meters from the station. The two Aris and Immanuel are told to hide in a parking lot with their lights off as the soldiers clear a Hamas-occupied building meters away. 

Despite the threat of gunfire, the men wheel a stretcher out to pick up wounded policemen then make their way back to Jerusalem at the end of a 13-hour day. 

Since the documentary aired, the trio have become minor celebrities in Israel. The Hasidic Jewish outlet, Vos Iz Neias, stated that “People started coming up to them on the street and thanking them for their efforts.” 

The leader of one of Israel’s secular political parties, Yair Lapid, later posted a comment on X that the three orthodox volunteers have changed the way “that haredim and secular Israelis look at each other.” “Only after they left,” Mr. Lapid added, “did I understand that I didn’t tell them how the secular Israelis view them today: With love. With respect and honor. With gratitude.”