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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →On the morning of October 7, 2023, rocket fire and attacks across southern Israel sent a sudden stream of wounded people to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. The hospital activated its emergency plan, moved exposed departments into protected areas, declared a mass-casualty incident, expanded trauma, intensive-care, surgical and imaging capacity, and called in additional personnel. Hundreds of patients were treated while rocket alerts continued to disrupt normal work.
Published accounts agree on the scale and character of the response, but they do not give one perfectly reconciled casualty total. Depending on the source, the first-day figure is 673 injured arrivals, 676 casualties, 680 casualties, or more than 670 people. Those numbers describe different reporting methods and should not be treated as interchangeable.
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Why Soroka was central to the response
Soroka Medical Center is located in Beersheba and serves as the major tertiary referral hospital for southern Israel. In a retrospective account by hospital leaders, Soroka is described as the region’s only level-one trauma center. That role meant it was equipped to receive patients with life-threatening injuries from a wide area, but it also made the hospital a focal point when multiple communities were attacked at once.
The available reports describe attacks and rocket fire in the surrounding region. They do not establish that the medical center itself was directly struck on October 7. The danger to the hospital came from continuing rocket alerts, the exposed location of some departments, and the risk faced by patients, staff and their families while mass casualties arrived.
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The first hours: from alarms to a mass-casualty declaration
Emergency teams mobilized after the sirens
Soroka’s emergency response team convened after air-raid sirens began. Departments operating in areas without adequate shelter were moved to pre-assigned protected locations. This was an early protective measure: clinical work had to continue, but it had to be reorganized around the possibility of further alerts and an expanding influx of wounded people.
A first arrival at 7:37 a.m.
The hospital leaders’ account records the first casualty arriving at 7:37 a.m. A mass-casualty incident was declared at 8 a.m., formally shifting the hospital from ordinary emergency operations to a coordinated surge response. By 9 a.m., hundreds of physicians and nurses were present, either reporting for duty or being mobilized within the hospital.
Rocket alerts continued during this period. The frontline report says that alerts halted triage at times, exposing staff and their families to danger and interrupting the normal sequence of assessment, prioritization and treatment. In a mass-casualty event, even short interruptions can affect where patients are sent, which operating room is used next and how quickly scarce staff and blood products are allocated.
The injuries arriving at Soroka
Accounts describe gunshot wounds, shrapnel injuries and burns among the incoming patients. The peer-reviewed study by Aya Gozlan and colleagues examined Soroka arrivals from 6:30 a.m. on October 7 through 7:00 a.m. on October 8, a 24-hour period. It recorded 673 injured people arriving at the hospital and a peak arrival rate of 83 injured patients per hour.
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How many people did Soroka treat?
The reported totals differ because the sources count slightly different things and use different wording. One study counts injured arrivals in a defined 24-hour cohort. A separate report by Soroka leaders uses the term casualties treated and gives two nearby totals in different passages. A hospital-affiliated foundation rounds the figure to more than 670 and separately identifies the seriously or critically injured.
| Source and attribution | Figure | What the number represents |
|---|---|---|
| Aya Gozlan et al., Israel Journal of Health Policy Research, 2024 | 673 | Injured people arriving at Soroka between 6:30 a.m. October 7 and 7:00 a.m. October 8 |
| Shlomi Codish et al., Intensive Care Medicine, 2024 | 676 | Casualties treated during the first 24 hours, as stated in one passage of the report |
| Shlomi Codish et al., Intensive Care Medicine, 2024 | 680 | Casualties treated within the first 24 hours, as stated later in the report’s conclusion |
| American Friends of Soroka Medical Center, institutional summary accessed October 13, 2026 | More than 670, including more than 130 serious or critical injuries | Rounded first-day institutional summary |
These figures should be quoted with their source and definition rather than silently combined. The difference between 673, 676 and 680 is not evidence that one account is necessarily false; it reflects inconsistent labels, rounding or counting conventions in reports written for different purposes. What is consistent is that Soroka received and treated well over 600 casualties in roughly one day.
The wider hospital-system picture
The 2024 peer-reviewed study gives a broader figure: 1,457 casualties were evacuated to a hospital during the first day, with approximately half taken to Soroka University Medical Center. Its abstract states: “During the first day of the attack, 1457 casualties were evacuated to a hospital, approximately half of them to Soroka University Medical Center (SUMC).” This is a hospital-system total, not a second count of Soroka arrivals.
The same study reports that about half of the casualties arriving at Soroka were hospitalized or transferred for definitive care after initial treatment there. That distinction matters. A patient can be assessed, stabilized, imaged or operated on at Soroka and then moved to another facility, so the number treated at the center is not the same as the number who remained admitted there.
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How Soroka expanded capacity
Trauma and intensive care
The frontline account says the trauma unit’s simultaneous treatment capacity was doubled from six patients to twelve. An eight-bed intensive-care unit was opened for the surge, adding monitored capacity at a time when critically injured patients were arriving alongside less severe casualties.
Creating a surgical ward
A 40-bed internal-medicine ward was converted into an acute surgical ward. This repurposing provided beds for patients who needed urgent operative or postoperative care but did not require the specific layout of the existing trauma unit. Additional operating areas were also used for emergency surgery.
Making room for incoming patients
To free beds, the hospital discharged 190 existing patients who were considered ready to leave. That step is part of surge medicine, but it does not mean those patients were simply abandoned; discharge decisions normally depend on clinical readiness, follow-up arrangements and the availability of another safe place for care.
Imaging in protected locations
Additional CT scanners located in protected areas were used to support diagnosis while rocket alerts continued. Moving imaging work into sheltered locations reduced the need to expose patients and staff unnecessarily during alarms and helped maintain access to rapid scans for head, chest, abdominal and extremity trauma.
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Staffing and blood supply
Medical personnel from other centers came to assist. The report by Codish and colleagues records 96 surgeries and the transfusion of 200 units of blood during its described first-day period. Those figures are reported by the clinicians who led or documented the response, not by an independent external audit.
Transfers and continuing treatment
The frontline report says 80 patients were transferred to hospitals elsewhere in Israel during the following eight hours, with additional transfers in later days. Transfers allowed Soroka to keep accepting new casualties instead of allowing its inpatient beds and critical-care spaces to become a bottleneck.
Transfer decisions in this setting can serve several purposes: moving a patient to definitive specialist care, freeing a monitored bed for a newly arriving critical patient, balancing the load among hospitals, or placing a stable patient closer to family and long-term services. The published accounts do not provide a patient-by-patient breakdown of those reasons, so no more specific distribution should be inferred.
What the response looked like in practice
- Protect exposed areas. Departments in unsheltered locations were moved to pre-assigned protected areas after the sirens began.
- Activate the emergency command structure. The response team convened and declared a mass-casualty incident at 8 a.m.
- Concentrate personnel. By 9 a.m., hundreds of physicians and nurses were present, supplemented by staff from other medical centers.
- Increase simultaneous treatment. Trauma capacity rose from six to twelve patients, an eight-bed intensive-care unit opened, and additional operating areas were used.
- Convert ordinary beds for acute surgery. A 40-bed internal-medicine ward became an acute surgical ward.
- Release capacity safely. One hundred ninety existing patients were discharged to make room for the influx.
- Use protected diagnostic resources. CT scanners in protected locations supported ongoing assessment despite alerts.
- Operate, transfuse and transfer. The reported first-day activity included 96 surgeries, 200 units of blood and transfers of 80 patients during the next eight hours.
What the reports establish—and what they do not
Strongly supported facts
- Soroka treated hundreds of casualties during the first day of the October 7 attacks.
- The hospital activated an emergency response early and declared a mass-casualty incident at 8 a.m., according to its leaders’ account.
- Rocket alerts continued to affect operations, including interruptions to triage.
- Capacity was expanded across trauma care, intensive care, surgery, imaging and inpatient beds.
- Patients were transferred to other hospitals as part of the response.
Limits of the evidence
The most detailed narratives are retrospective reports written by Soroka-affiliated clinicians and administrators. They are valuable first-person clinical accounts, and the Gozlan paper is peer-reviewed evidence for its defined patient cohort, but neither source is an independent investigation of every event in southern Israel. The foundation’s summary is useful institutional context but gives a rounded figure and is also hospital-affiliated.
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The sources do not reconcile the 673, 676 and 680 counts into one definitive total. They also do not establish that Soroka itself was directly hit on October 7. A careful account therefore separates the attacks in the surrounding region from the hospital’s documented medical response.
Why Soroka’s response mattered
The event tested whether a regional trauma center could keep functioning while facing two simultaneous problems: an unusually large number of injured people and an ongoing threat to the hospital environment. Soroka’s documented measures—protected relocation, rapid command activation, expanded treatment spaces, extra staff, use of sheltered imaging, blood-product mobilization and onward transfers—were designed to preserve patient flow under those conditions.
The clinicians’ retrospective reports present early mobilization, protecting patients and staff, expanding imaging and operating capacity, and transferring patients as central lessons. Those are the authors’ interpretations of their experience, not the conclusions of a separate audit. Even with that qualification, the accounts show a hospital converting its ordinary resources into a coordinated mass-casualty system within hours.
The clearest answer to the question
On October 7, Soroka Medical Center became the main receiving hospital for a large share of southern Israel’s wounded. It moved vulnerable services into protected areas, declared a mass-casualty incident at 8 a.m., assembled hundreds of clinicians, doubled trauma treatment slots, opened intensive-care capacity, converted a ward for acute surgery, used protected CT scanners, performed dozens of emergency operations, transfused blood and transferred patients to other hospitals. Published sources place the first-day Soroka total at more than 670, with the exact figure varying by definition and report.
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