Driver, 71, lightly hurt after car hits a store at an Ashdod shopping center

A driver was lightly injured when his car crashed into a store at a shopping center in Ashdod, the coastal city in southern Israel. Magen David Adom, Israel's national emergency medical service, said its dispatch center for the Lachish region received the call at 13:09 reporting that a vehicle had struck a shop in a commercial center in the city.

Medics and paramedics treated a man aged 71 and took him to Assuta hospital in Ashdod in light condition, according to the service. Its crews also gave care at the scene to two people it described as anxiety casualties. N12, the news arm of Israel's Channel 12, carried the same account: a driver hit a store at a shopping center, the man was lightly hurt, and he was evacuated to the city's Assuta hospital.

Who reported what

All three reports describe the same basic sequence: a car, a store, a shopping center in Ashdod, and a driver who came away with light injuries. They differ on one detail. Magen David Adom and N12 both give the driver's age as 71. Ynet's alert service gave his age as 70 and also named the store, identifying it as an Auto Depot branch. Neither of the other two reports names the business. We have not been able to establish which age is correct and report both figures as they were published.

N12 credited its image of the scene to the spokesperson's office of United Hatzalah, a separate volunteer emergency medical organisation. N12's text, however, attributes the medical treatment itself to Magen David Adom crews, and United Hatzalah's own account of the incident is not among the reports available to us.

Magen David Adom and the 101 line

Magen David Adom, usually shortened to MDA in Israel, is the country's national ambulance and emergency medical service and the Israeli member society of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. In Israel, members of the public reach it by dialling 101, the emergency medical number. MDA runs its dispatch through regional centers; the call in this case was handled by the center covering the Lachish region, the area of southern Israel that includes Ashdod.

MDA publishes brief incident updates through its spokesperson's office, typically giving the time a call came in, the number of people treated, their approximate age and gender, their condition and the hospital they were taken to. Israeli news outlets often relay those updates within minutes, which is why several reports of a single local incident can appear in quick succession with near identical details.

What "light condition" and "anxiety casualty" mean

Israeli emergency services describe patients' condition on a scale that runs from light through moderate and serious to critical. A patient described as being in light condition is generally conscious and not considered to be in danger, though the label does not describe the specific injuries.

The term anxiety casualty, a translation of the Hebrew phrase nifga'ei charada, is used by Israeli emergency services for people who need treatment for acute stress or shock after witnessing or being near an incident, without having been physically hurt. It appears frequently in Israeli incident reporting, from road crashes to rocket fire, and MDA counts such patients separately from those with physical injuries. In this case the service said it treated two of them at the scene; the reports do not say whether either was taken to hospital.

Ashdod and its hospital

Ashdod is one of Israel's larger cities, located on the Mediterranean coast south of Tel Aviv and home to one of the country's main seaports. Assuta Ashdod is the city's public hospital and the main destination for patients evacuated by ambulance from incidents in and around Ashdod.

What the reports do not say

None of the three reports explains why the car struck the store. They do not say whether the driver suffered a medical episode, lost control of the vehicle, or mistook one pedal for another, and they do not say whether police have opened an investigation. The reports do not describe the extent of damage to the store, whether it was open or busy at the time, or whether anyone inside it was hurt physically. The exact location of the shopping center within Ashdod is not given, and the driver's age differs by one year between Ynet and the other two outlets. We will not fill those gaps with assumptions; any further detail would need to come from police, MDA or the store's operator.