North Shore Doctor Volunteers On Frontlines With Israeli Red Cross

LAKE FOREST, IL — In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, a local emergency room doctor immediately sought ways to help, signing up for several lists of available volunteers.

Dr. David Kawior wound up traveling around Israel last month with a mobile critical care unit of Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross, volunteering to help treat injured soldiers, train Israeli military paramedics and survey the sites of some of the approximately 10,000 rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian militants during the eight-week war.

For part of his nearly two-week trip, Kawior was stationed in the city of Sderot, located within a mile of the Gaza Strip. Nearly all the city's 35,000 residents have evacuated since the Hamas attacks, with only a couple thousand Israeli soldiers remaining. The streets were eerily quiet, he recalled, with ominous reminders of the violence.

"That city is very much frozen in time, it was the site of one of the [Oct. 7] massacres too, so you go around the city, there's cars that are riddled with bullets," Kawior told Patch.

"There are bus stops that are still stained, you'll see this inky black, almost it looks like a mud splash, and that's all just dried blood. It's frozen in time, in terms of the Jewish holidays that occurred around that time. People didn't take down their decorations, they just left," he said. "So it's a monument, almost, to the atrocities that happened there as well, but it's an area of real imminent danger."

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During his time in Sderot, Kawior saw bullet-riddled sukkah, the tents erected for the seven-day holiday of Sukkot, that remained from the attack.

"When you walk into those, it is very, very startling and you can kind of understand why they keep them there, too," he said. "On the one hand, some of it is evidentially, but some of it is really like a monument to what happened there. It's a very startling reminder."

Kawior faced rocket attacks on a near-daily basis, forcing split-second life-or-death decisions, during his time near the front, he said.

"Where I was, there was definitely imminent danger, pretty much at all time, in that regard," he said.

The Israeli government's Home Front Command app notifies users of incoming rockets as they are fired from Gaza and targeted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. People in Tel Aviv have up to a couple minutes to get to shelter, but in Sderot, Kawior said, the alerts came in with just seconds to spare.

"So from the time you hear that siren. If you are not in a safe area, then you need to dive to the ground. You need to be wearing armor at all times, usually a helmet with a bulletproof vest at the very least, and then you need to dive to the ground completely flat covering your head," he said.

At one point, about 10 feet outside the medical station Sderot where he was working, a young soldier was kneeling instead of standing when a rocket landed, spraying pieces of shrapnel as it exploded. One struck her in the head. She went into cardiac arrest and had to be transported for treatment, Kawior said.

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"It happened so frequently in Sderot that the star of David over the Israeli Red Cross station, half the Star of David is made from old rockets and in front of one of the synagogues they made a menorah out of the rockets, kind of as a testimony for how often it happens," he said.

Every time a rocket was fired, a Magen David Adom team would travel to the site where they landed to survey the damage and ensure there were no causalities or unexploded munitions left behind.

Kawior also worked at a trauma center in the coastal city of Ashdod, which would treat the most critically injured Israeli soldiers coming from the front in Gaza, working with paramedics in the Israeli military to stabilize patients as they arrive on helicopters.

And he traveled to the north, where he helped train paramedics on the use of high-dose naloxone, the antidote to opiate overdoses, to prepare for the potential use of fentanyl-based gas. A form of the gas was used by Russian forces in an assault of hostage-takers in a Moscow theater in 2002, and Kawior said there is some concern that Hezbollah may have acquired such a gas for use on Israelis.

Kawior's trip, which began Nov. 11 and wrapped up just before Thanksgiving, was not the first time the Vernon Hills resident had traveled to Israel.

After the Holocaust, his paternal grandmother's family immigrated to Israel, leaving one war and walking into another in 1948, while his paternal grandfather, his family's lone survivor of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, came to the United States.

"It was his dream that someone would become a doctor in the family, like the typical immigrant Jewish experience," said Kawior, who fulfilled that dream when he became the first doctor in the family.

His first trip to Israel came when he was 15 during the Second Intifada, and Kawior became accustomed to the threat of suicide bombing attacks by Palestinian militant groups on civilians inside Israel.

Kawior returned to Israel in 2012, practicing trauma surgery at a hospital in Soroka medical center in Beer-Sheva during the Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip dubbed "Pillar of Cloud." One of his cousins now works at the medical center, telling Kawior that Soroka treated about 800 casualties after Oct. 7, mostly from the massacre of attendees of the Supernova music festival.

Before getting the offer to help with the Israeli Red Cross, Kawior considered helping to run an emergency room at a hospital in Elat. The Red Sea city has swelled with some of the quarter-million Israelis who have been internally displaced after the start of the latest Israel-Hamas war. But Kawior said he felt better suited to the role of front-line training and assistance, and instead traveled with the Red Cross.

"I was trained in Chicago, very much in a 'knife and gun club' training apparatus, so I was very familiar with these things. Of course not familiar in terms of a mass casualty [event], apart from the Highland Park shooting, which we absorbed a lot of those patients at Lake Forest [Hospital.] Not as familiar in terms of being in a specific wartime or war zone situation, especially out in the field," he said. "But I felt like I could be the most helpful and of service in that regard, versus just doing a lateral approach to what I'm doing now."

Before heading to the war zone, Kawior updated his will and said goodbye to his children as they attended a party at a suburban trampoline park. It was a strange feeling, he said, juxtaposed with the absence of frolicking children at empty playgrounds in Israel.

Kawior said it was an easy decision to decide to volunteer, but practically it was difficult due to his three young children and shifts at Northwestern Medicine facilities in Lake Forest, Grayslake and McHenry.

"Thankfully my group at Northwestern were incredibly accommodating, very understanding about what was happening, because I had to move something like 10 shifts around over two weeks between three different emergency rooms around Thanksgiving, of course, so that's not an easy thing," he said. "And I can say I had total support from my group, I had total support from leadership."

Lake Forest Hospital Medical Staff Vice Chair Dr. Aaron Epstein, who works with Kawior as an emergency room doctor in Lake Forest, praised his colleague’s decision to volunteer on the edge of a war zone.

“The fact that David was willing to leave his family during the holiday season to volunteer on the front lines in Israel and provide medical aid to those in need during this challenging time, exemplifies everything we stand for at Northwestern Medicine,” Epstein said in a statement. “David is a selfless human and a dedicated physician, as well as a strong colleague and friend.”

His efforts were also deeply appreciated by Israelis he encountered on his trip, such as soldiers who would ask where he was from.

"I'd say, 'Chicago.' And they'd be like, 'What are you doing here?'" he said. "And it's just like, 'We're here to be with you.' And you could just see their entire demeanor change, that it was so welcoming and warming for them to have that sort of support even if you weren't doing something hands on, it was an experience I'll never forget to have that sort of interaction with people was on a level I've never experienced."

And after returning for extra-grateful Thanksgiving, Kawior reflected on an "absolutely unbelievable experience" visiting a deeply traumatized Israeli society.

"Coming back, it was absolutely a life-changing experience. The best way I can describe being there, it's almost like you're visiting a shiva house, so like a house in mourning," he said. "It's almost like, on a national level, you're entering a country that is in a state of mourning. And they welcome you like a family does that's in mourning, where you're crying with them, you're laughing with them, you're serving with them."