They had prepared for the worst — only to discover they didn’t know the meaning of the word.
Gut-wrenching newly released security footage from inside an Israeli hospital captures the chaos and heroism on Oct. 7, 2023 — as hundreds of traumatized and bloodied victims of Hamas’ sneak attack poured through its doors.
The footage shows wounded soldiers and civilians rushing through Soroka Medical Center as doctors and nurses scramble to treat the patients, who ranged from babies to elderly Israelis to young revelers sH๏τ at the Nova music festival — and even a heavily pregnant mom.
“At some point you realize you’re not seeing a terror attack, you’re seeing a mᴀssacre,” Prof. Shlomi Codish, CEO of Clalit-Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, told The Post on the eve of the attack’s third anniversary.
The hospital, the only Level 1 trauma center in southern Israel, treated a staggering 674 wounded in the first 24 hours after the terror attack — more than five times the 121 casualties from the largest mᴀss-casualty incident it had previously faced.
“The maximum number we practiced for was 300,” Codish said. “We do drills to 300, which is considered a fantastic number that we’ll never see.”
The hospital’s emergency protocols kicked in almost immediately after the attack began, with Soroka ordering 100 additional units of blood and summoning more than 1,000 staffers before 8 a.m.
“If we hadn’t done that, people would have died,” Codish said of the blood order.
By the time hospital leaders arrived, it was becoming clear that this was unlike anything they had prepared for.
“If you take the wildest horror director somewhere, they’re not going to come up with this scenario,” Codish said.
The hospital’s first operation was on a Bedouin Muslim woman in her 20s who was more than 40 weeks pregnant with her first child when she was sH๏τ in the abdomen.
Doctors saved the woman and delivered her daughter during emergency surgery, but the baby died 14 hours later.
“This is evil beyond what you can comprehend,” Codish said. “When you shoot someone with a gun, you see who you’re shooting. Someone deliberately sH๏τ a very pregnant young woman, not a soldier, who also happened to be Muslim.”
Later, soldiers brought in two babies without their parents after finding the infants alive in a room where their mother and father had been killed nearby, Codish said.
Another patient arrived in shock after watching his wife and son murdered in front of him inside a shelter at a kibbutz. He ultimately lost a leg.
“Beyond the bodily wound, how do you fathom this?” Codish said. “How does your mind wrap itself around that?”
The previously unreleased hospital surveillance footage was broadcast this week in “The Shift,” an episode of the investigative program “Zman Emet” on KAN 11, Israel’s public broadcaster.
The documentary draws on cameras throughout the hospital to show the medical center as the magnitude of the attack gradually became apparent.
In one scene, 23-year-old Golani soldier Noam is rushed down a Soroka corridor with a devastating leg injury when his father, Avraham, spots him on the stretcher.
The father runs alongside his son and manages to kiss him before doctors rush him into the trauma room. Noam survived but lost his leg.
Meanwhile, Soroka was running out of room.
The 1,200-bed hospital was already largely occupied when the wounded began arriving, forcing administrators to send hundreds of existing patients home or to other hospitals, turn internal medicine wards into surgical wards and convert open spaces into intensive-care areas.
Hundreds of frantic relatives also descended on the hospital searching for loved ones who had vanished during the attack.
“No one realized we had so many ᴅᴇᴀᴅ people in the field,” Codish said. “The heartbreaking realization over the next 24 hours was: They’re not here.”
By 6 a.m. the following morning, Soroka had identified every anonymous patient in its care, but desperate families were still holding out hope.
“As I walked down the hospital, there were ‘Have you seen?’ signs everywhere, which really reminded us of post-9/11,” Codish said.
Soroka officials knew by then that the people pictured on the posters were not among their unidentified patients, but they left the signs hanging.
“It was the only remnant of hope that people had,” Codish said.
Hospital staff pH๏τographed the posters and later learned what happened to the people pictured on them.
“Every single one of them was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ,” he said.
Eighteen people died at Soroka that day — 11 who arrived ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and seven who died during treatment.
“Every hour went by, it became apparent that this is the worst we’ve ever seen,” Codish said. “And then the next hour proved that it could be worse.”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
