Israel's First Baby of 2026 Came at 12:01. Then the Calls Started

Israel's first baby of 2026 arrived one minute after midnight. Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital in Jerusalem said a boy was born at 12:01 a.m. to Shira-Leah and Uri Rozman of Dolev, weighing 2,884 grams and delivered with the help of midwives Odelia Mendelovich and Rachel Znwirt. He is the couple's fifth child. “I had a good birth with a wonderful midwifery team, thank God, everything went great and it was a lovely experience,” the mother said. A teacher by profession, she added: “I wish all of us a happy birthday, may the Jewish people continue to grow and multiply.”

The rest of the night belonged to Magen David Adom, Israel's national emergency medical service, which said its medics and paramedics treated hundreds of people between the evening and the morning. Fifty-one people were hurt in road accidents, three of them in moderate condition and 48 lightly injured. Eleven were hurt in violent incidents, including a man of about 30 who was seriously injured in a stabbing near a forest, with four others moderately hurt and six lightly. Teams treated roughly 50 teenagers and adults for alcohol-related injuries, and ambulances and mobile intensive care units carried 21 women in labour to hospitals around the country.

“As every year, MDA volunteers and employees were deployed across the country and provided life-saving medical care to partygoers on New Year's Eve,” said the organisation's director, Eli Bin. “Unfortunately, even at the beginning of the new year, the teams in the field were called to handle traffic accidents and alcohol-related incidents.”

What Magen David Adom is

MDA (the name means Red Shield of David) is Israel's national ambulance, blood and disaster-response service, the country's equivalent of the Red Cross societies it sits alongside internationally. It runs the national 101 emergency line, and its workforce is overwhelmingly volunteer. In its summary of 2025, published on 30 December that year, it reported about 39,200 volunteers, employees and national service participants, 16,500 of them teenagers, working out of 211 stations and dispatch points.

One night against a year

The same report puts the New Year's Eve figures in proportion. Across 2025 MDA emergency vehicles were dispatched 1,383,026 times (on average once every 22.8 seconds), and its teams treated 71,736 casualties of road accidents, six percent more than in 2024, while flagging a rise in road deaths, The Jerusalem Post reported. Crews attended 1,014 births outside hospital, at home or on the way in (down from 1,156 the year before, by MDA's own count for 2024) and collected 263,945 units of blood at 8,859 donation drives. Set against that, the 51 road-accident casualties of the first hours of 2026 are a heavy night rather than an extraordinary one, which is roughly the point Bin was making.

What is still unclear

MDA did not give a total number of calls for the night, so the “hundreds” treated cannot be compared with an ordinary night. It did not say where the stabbing took place beyond “near a forest”, or give any update on the condition of the seriously injured man. Neither the hospital nor MDA said whether any of the road-accident casualties were connected to the alcohol-related call-outs.