Military officials and ambulance services failed to coordinate the evacuation of wounded civilians from terror-struck communities and across southern Israel on October 7, 2023, contributing to the chaos amid the attack and likely keeping some from receiving life-saving care, the state comptroller charged in a report published Tuesday.

The report from auditor Matanyahu Englman offers the sole broad official reckoning with the catastrophic failures surrounding the attack in the absence of a state inquiry. It further found that hospital loads were mismanaged during the crisis, leading to two medical centers being inundated while other facilities had unused capacity, and that the Health Ministry had failed to prepare for rehabilitating large numbers of people following a mass casualty event.

According to the report, the Israel Defense Forces should have been responsible for evacuating the injured as Hamas gunmen stormed communities, towns, music festivals and other sites on the morning of October 7.

Instead, it relied on ambulance services such as Magen David Adom, which lacked protective gear needed to operate in active combat zones and, unbeknownst to the army, had ordered ambulance drivers not to enter communities where terrorists were present.

During the attack, civilians and local security squads were largely left to fend for themselves, with many never receiving care, and others making harrowing journeys through deadly fire in private vehicles to reach medical care.

“The responsibility for evacuating the wounded from the combat zones on October 7 was that of the IDF’s Southern Command and the Gaza Division, since they are the military bodies responsible for the Gaza border area communities,” the report said.

While taking responsibility for failing to protect Gaza border communities that day, the IDF responded that under the complex circumstances on the ground and the need to repel the terrorists and achieve operational control to save lives, the number of evacuated wounded was relatively high.

Though 1,640 emergency incidents were registered that day, only 525 wounded individuals were evacuated in medical vehicles, 84 of them in bulletproof ambulances and 21 people by helicopter.

According to the comptroller, there had been warnings since 2016 about the need for more armored ambulances, but funding for them had not been allocated.

On the eve of the Hamas invasion, there were 24 armored ambulances nationwide, when 50 had been needed, and just one was in the region, stationed in the city of Sderot.

While information about the wounded was being received by MDA, the army apparently did not understand that it also had access to the same data.

The emergency service told the State Comptroller’s Office that it had installed a “digital medical situation room” at the IDF’s Gaza Division HQ in 2022 and tested it just four days before the Hamas invasion, which left some 1,200 dead and thousands injured. The platform shared details about every emergency call-out in real time, with exact locations of the wounded and the distribution of ambulances in the area.

Despite this, the person serving as the divisional medical officer on October 7 said that since taking up his post in August 2023, no one had told him about the digital platform, and that during numerous conversations with MDA on October 7, no one raised it either. The IDF denied that such a platform was available.

Furthermore, the IDF had no idea that MDA had told ambulances not to enter the communities infiltrated by the terrorists to evacuate wounded........

© The Times of Israel