Dr. Gal Rosen is an Israeli paramedic who has saved lives under the threat of rocket attacks.
Racing from emergency to emergency, heart pounding, but calm under fire – “don’t think, just act.”
He said that as a child he lost his mother at the hands of a murderous terrorist. He saved lives as an army paramedic, but he now continues to do it as a civilian – defiantly choosing to live in Israel and work at the Tel Aviv hospital. Magen David Adam (MDA) while the country is under threat and emergency due to wars on multiple fronts.
He saves lives in the ‘darkness’ of war. He sees lives disappear, sometimes after making difficult split-second decisions.
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Dr. Gal Rosen, a Tel Aviv paramedic, has delivered five babies in his time, but Nikola’s son was his firstborn under the stress of a rocket attack and blaring Iron Dome sirens. (Viri Acoca / photo provided)
But today he shares a story of ‘light’: a stark contrast to the stories he usually refuses to share with his family to spare them the horrific reality of war – even as they experience it themselves.
Last Thursday, Rosen delivered a healthy baby boy and, under the sudden threat of a rocket attack and blaring sirens, carried that son away from the mother into the ambulance as he and the father rushed to reach a shelter.
This was his fifth emergency newborn baby delivery as a paramedic. It was his first time being threatened by a rocket attack and blaring sirens.
“It was such a surreal situation that I don’t think has ever happened to me, anything like this,” he said, able to smile about the seriousness of it all a week later, after finally finding sleep and time to think.
“This is great to share at home,” Rosen said. “Most of my stories aren’t like that. Most of our stories that I share are really hard things for my family to hear. This is why I usually don’t share stories about my work with my family: ‘Sorry, I don’t do it.’
“Car accidents or about the resuscitations or about very difficult situations that I had to deal with.”
Just two days after bringing one life into the world, he saw five disappear.
“I had, like last Saturday, five on-duty deaths,” he said. “I don’t want to go home and tell my family about it, right? But this story is great.
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“I went to my grandmother,” he continued, “and said, ‘You have to hear it.’
“She was so proud of me and also of my family and my father and my friends and my partner. This is of course a very nice story to tell everyone.“
The call came around 6:30 a.m. local time in Tel Aviv on Thursday morning: a woman was in labor and was receiving emergency delivery assistance over the phone as if it were a movie.
But this was real life, new life and war.
By the time the MDA paramedic team arrived, the baby was still inside and the man was helping his wife during the final moments of the birth. Dr. Rosen intervened in the last few minutes and helped deliver the boy safely.
Then came the warning.
Within moments, a warning sounded that a rocket attack on Tel Aviv was expected within about ten minutes. The paramedic suddenly had to balance the urgency of a wartime emergency with the delicate, crucial first steps of childbirth.
He quickly placed the newborn on the mother’s chest for skin-to-skin contact, an important step for bonding and early development. He had the father cut the umbilical cord and helped the mother care for the baby for the first time.
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“I tried to do something for them that was as close to reality as possible,” he said, wanting to maintain 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 to the building’s bomb shelter. There, amid the loud 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 was an alarm,” he said.
“Adrenaline” and the paramedical instinct of the former army took over.
“I put the helmet on, I put the vest on and everything, I grabbed the baby, and we pulled over and I ran with the baby to a public shelter,” he recalls. “So me and the dad run together, I take the baby, run to a shelter and just a random building and there was no shelter there.
“‘Okay, this isn’t good.’ We have to go outside.
“And we go outside. There’s still an alarm going off; I know we have about 20 seconds to get to another building, and then we get to a public shelter. There are 50 people there in the shelter and they have closed the door. We were still standing there in the shelter, so I gave the father the baby.
‘I didn’t want the father to have to think in the future about the situation where a stranger was holding his baby while a rocket attack took place.“
At the shelter, with the postpartum mother still in the ambulance under the Iron Dome, the unmistakable sound of war came with a jolt.
“We also heard the Iron Dome interception,” Rosen said.
The sound, he said, was impossible to ignore: “a boom,” followed by a shock wave you could feel.
The air trembled.
The grateful mother and father, identified by MDA as Nikola and Violet, said the experience was frightening but the emergency team helped them stay calm.
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“It was not an easy experience,” they wrote in a joint statement, preferring privacy, but Dr. Rosen to share the war story out of praise and gratitude.
“The birth started at home, and just minutes after the MDA team delivered the baby, the siren caught us and we went to a shelter. The team did a great job, calming us down and treating us in the best way possible. This is not the ideal experience, but we are happy that everything ended safely and we are grateful to the team who helped us so much.”
In that cramped shelter of about fifty tightly packed Israelis, surrounded by strangers and the threat of falling rockets, the room erupted in applause. People congratulated the father and shouted ‘Mazal tov.’
Mom was still in the ambulance with members of the MDA team, still at risk postpartum, as the Iron Dome fired missiles overhead.
“And after sitting there for ten minutes, we went out and walked down the street with a 30-minute old baby. We crossed the intersection together and went 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 and too risky for her.
“And you know, in these moments I wasn’t thinking so much. So I just acted.
“I realized that it would be better to protect the son; it would be better to go and find shelter. And we didn’t think about the idea that we might panic, because we were in the situation, we were at this moment, we are with the family, with the birth, with everything, and you can’t imagine something like that – even though it is Israel, and now we can actually imagine everything.
“Still, it was really exciting – excitement and happiness – and a good thing too, because most of our days are dark now.”
Despite losing his mother to a murderous terrorist and living under the threat of wars on multiple fronts and screeching Iron Dome sirens and rocket attacks, Rosen wouldn’t choose another life.
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Magen David Adom (MDA) emergency teams respond to the scene of Iranian missile attacks in Tel Aviv, Israel on Friday, June 13, 2025. (Magen David Adom (MDA))
“My mother was murdered in a terrorist attack when I was a child, 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, to take 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 who will have to suffer through a loss.
“So I think this is the mentality of Israelis in general. But still, you see, this is one of the few places in the world where people are saved by a flight to return to Israel.
“In a war,” he deadpanned.
But while everything happened under the stress of war, Rosen maintained the calm, precision and determination of an Army paramedic, knowing that the best medicine for a baby born under stress is skin-to-skin and breast milk.
“I learned in medical school that these two things are most important: put the baby on the skin, give her the band, help her feed,” he said. “It can also help the mother a lot when she is breastfeeding the baby. It also helps with postpartum hemorrhage. And much more.
“So this situation is difficult to achieve when we are in this missile attack.”
But all is well, it ended well and – in the case of Nikola and Violet’s newborn – it started as well as it could under the circumstances.
“I was so excited I couldn’t sleep, just like giving birth. My shift lasted about 17 hours,” he recalls. “So I worked 16 hours. It was after a 17-hour shift.
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“Now and then after a 17 hour 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.“
A week later, the adrenaline and excitement have not disappeared. And the boy, the mother, the father and the MDA paramedic team live on and tell it to an all-rounder.
