Israeli paramedic delivers baby, rushes it to bomb shelter during Iran attack
Dr. Gal Rosen is an Israeli paramedic who has saved lives under the threat of missile attacks.
Racing from emergency to emergency, heart pounding, but calm under fire — "don't think, just act."
He said he lost his mother when he was a child at the hands of a murderous terrorist. He saved lives as an army paramedic, but he continues to do it now as a civilian — defiantly choosing to live in Israel and work at Tel Aviv's Magen David Adom (MDA) while under threat and emergencies from multiple-front wars.
He saves lives in the "dark" of war. He sees lives go, sometimes after making difficult split-second decisions.
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"We need to choose sometimes," he says, speaking to Fox News Digital during a rare moment off between emergencies. "And this is hard."
But, today, he is sharing a story of "light": a stark contrast from the stories he usually refuses to share with his family to spare them the horrifying realities of war — even if they live those themselves.
Last Thursday, Rosen delivered a healthy baby boy into the world and, in sudden threat of a missile attack and blaring sirens, carried that son away from the mother in the ambulance as he and the father raced to reach a bomb shelter.
This was his fifth emergency delivery of a newborn as a paramedic. It was his first under the threat of a missile attack and blaring sirens.
"It was so surrealistic situation, in my opinion, never happened to me, something like this," he said, able to smile about the gravity of it all one week later, after finally finding sleep and time to reflect.
"This is an amazing thing to share at home," Rosen said. "Most of my stories are not like this, most of our stories I share are really hard things for my family to hear. This is why, usually, I'm not sharing with my family stories from my work: 'Sorry, I'm not doing it.'
"Car accidents or about the CPRs or about really difficult situations that I had to deal with."
Just two days after bringing one life into the world, he saw five go.
"I had, like last Saturday, five cases of death in the shift," he said. "I don't want to get home and tell about it in my family, right? But this story is amazing.
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"I went to my grandma," he continued, "and said, 'You have to hear it.'
"She was so proud of me and also my family and my father and my friends and my partner. Of course, this is a really nice story to tell to everyone."
The call came around 6:30 a.m. local Tel Aviv time on a Thursday morning: a woman was in labor, getting an assist on emergency delivery over the phone as if it was a movie.
But this was real life, a new life and war.
By the time the MDA paramedic team arrived, the baby was still inside and the husband was helping his wife through the final moments of delivery. Dr. Rosen stepped in for the last few minutes and helped safely deliver the boy.
Then came the alert.
Within moments, a warning sounded that a missile attack on Tel Aviv was expected in about 10 minutes. The paramedic suddenly had to balance the urgency of a wartime emergency with the delicate, critical first steps of childbirth.
He quickly placed the newborn on the mother’s chest for skin-to-skin contact, a key step for bonding and early development. He had the father cut the umbilical cord and helped the mother nurse the baby for the first time.
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"I tried to do something as close as possible to reality for them," he said, wanting to preserve the intimacy of a normal birth even though they were far from a hospital delivery room.
With the help of the father and her team, he then moved the family into the building’s shelter. There, in the middle of blaring alarms and the sounds of missile interceptions overhead, relatives from the apartment building — a grandmother, an aunt and others — came downstairs and saw the baby for the first time.
"It was the first time they met the baby, while there were alarms," he said.
"Adrenaline" and former army paramedic instinct took over.
"I put the helmet, I put the vest and everything, I took the baby, and we stopped by the side and I ran with the baby to a public shelter," he recalled. "So, me and the father, we're running together, I'm taking the baby with me, running to a shelter and just a random building and there was no shelter there.
"'OK, this is not good.' We need to go out.
"And we're going out. There is still alarms; I know that we have like maybe 20 seconds left, going to another building, and then we're getting into a public shelter. There is 50 people there in the shelter and they closed the door. We were still there standing in the shelter, so I gave the father the baby.
"I didn't want the idea for the father also — you know, in the future — to think about the situation that a stranger held his baby while there is a missile attack."
In the shelter, with the postpartum mother still in the ambulance under the Iron Dome, the unmistakable sound of war came with a shock.
"We also heard the interception with the Iron Dome," Rosen said.
The sound, he said, was impossible to ignore: "a boom," followed by a shock wave you could feel.
The air was vibrating.
The grateful father and mother, identified by MDA as Nikola and Violet, said the experience was frightening but that the emergency team helped keep them calm.
"It wasn’t a simple experience," they wrote in a joint statement, preferring to keep privacy but permitting Dr. Rosen to share the war story out of praise and thankfulness.
"The labor started at home, and just minutes after the MDA team delivered the baby, the siren caught us, and we went down to a shelter. The team functioned amazingly, calmed us, and treated us in the best possible way. This isn’t the ideal experience, but we’re happy everything ended safely, and we’re grateful to the team who helped us so much."
In that cramped shelter of about 50 huddling Israelis, surrounded by strangers and the threat of falling missiles, the room broke into applause. People congratulated the father and shouted "Mazal tov."
Mother was still in the ambulance with members of the MDA team, still at risk postpartum, as the Iron Dome was busting missiles overhead.
"And after 10 minutes that we sat there, we went out, and we walked in the street with a baby, 30 minutes old, crossing the intersection together, going to the ambulance," Rosen said. "They put a helmet on her and a vest on the mother, and one of my teammates stayed with her, because she couldn't come to the shelter. It was too much time, too risky for her.
"And, you know, in these moments, I didn't think so much. So I just act.
"I realized that it would be better to protect the son; it would better to go to find a shelter. And we didn't think about the idea that maybe we'll be in alarms, because we were in the situation, we were at the moment, we're with the family, with the delivery, with everything, and you can't imagine something like this — even though it's Israel, and now we can actually imagine everything.
"Still, it was really, really, really exciting — excitement and happiness – and a good thing because most of our days right now are dark."
Despite losing his mother to a murderous terrorist and living under the threat of multiple-front wars and shrieking Iron Dome sirens and missile attacks, Rosen would choose no other life.
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"My mother was murdered in a terror attack when I was a kid, when I was a child, and to choose to still be here with my family, to live here: This is our home and to choose, going to a different path, not hate.
"I will save lives, and I will do my best to help other families going through these situations, and I will do my best to make sure there are no other families that will need to suffer from a loss.
"So I think this is the mentality of Israelis in general. But still, see, this is one of the only places in the world that people are getting rescued by a flight to come back to Israel.
"In a war," he deadpanned.
But, with everything happening under the stress of war, Rosen kept the calm, precision and resolve of an army paramedic, knowing the best medicine for a baby born under stress is skin-to-skin and mother's milk.
"I learned in med school, I learned these two things are the most important: Put the baby on the skin, give them the bond, help her to nurse," he said. "It also can help the mother a lot when she nursing the baby. It's also helping with postpartum bleeding. And a lot of things.
"So this situation, it's hard to do when we are in this missile attack."
But all is well that ended well and — in the case of Nikola and Violet's newborn — began as well as could be under the circumstances.
"I was so excited I couldn't sleep for — like the delivery. It was something like 17 hours into my shift," he recalled. "So I worked 16 hours. It was after 17 hours shift.
"Now and after 17 hours shift, I went back home, I tried to sleep, I couldn't sleep, and then I had to go to another shift. So I was awake for at least 24 hours."
One week later, the adrenaline and excitement have not worn off. And the baby boy, mother, father and MDA paramedic team live on to tell an all-timer.