During Operation "With All My Heart," after a missile hit a nearby building, Beersheba's municipal rescue unit received an urgent call about a family stranded on the ninth floor of a damaged apartment building without electricity. The son uses a heavy motorized wheelchair and could not descend the stairs, and his mother also had difficulty walking. The city’s rescue volunteers from Unit "Ra'am 7" responded, in a city that had already suffered three direct hits in less than a week, including one at Soroka Medical Center.
The evacuation was possible thanks to training the team had completed only two weeks earlier through "The Purple Vest," an initiative by Accessibility Israel designed to ensure that people with disabilities and elderly residents are not left behind in emergencies. The program trains emergency crews, local authorities, organizations, and businesses to identify needs, communicate with people with different disabilities, and evacuate them safely. After the training and professional guidance, Beersheba bought specialized evacuation equipment, including a stair evacuation chair used to remove the son.
Moron Ben Shitrit Ramot, deputy commander of the unit, said the equipment "greatly helped" in this case and in other incidents, including at Soroka, where the team evacuated injured people who could not be carried on stretchers. Abital Kazlan, head of training for "The Purple Vest," said she was on site when the equipment was used for the first time and saw that the lessons from the training had been implemented in the field.
Ben Shitrit Ramot said the rescuers transferred the son into the evacuation chair and brought him down the stairs while she held the mother’s hand the entire way. She said the son was very distressed at first, but the team calmed him down, and at the end the mother thanked them, saying, "You are amazing, thank you very much." Beersheba city manager Liz Ovadia-Avissidriss said the partnership with Accessibility Israel began after a simple email and called the program "a gift" for the city, adding that when a missile hits, "it does not choose where to fall" and that the city has a duty to help people with special needs.
Accessibility Israel says the training grew out of a gap it identified in local emergency preparedness, where authorities focused on evacuation but not on the specific needs of people with disabilities and seniors. The group recently received a dedicated NIS 100,000 donation from Clal Insurance to improve accessible emergency readiness in Beersheba, including mapping accessibility gaps, training municipal staff and the public, and creating a local "Purple Vest" response team. Kazlan said more cities are joining, but not enough, and urged authorities and businesses to prepare now, because the training can save lives.
