On October 7, 2023, United Hatzalah’s two medical helicopters flew back and forth into the combat zone and rescued hundreds of people. That is what the organization’s president, Eli Beer, told the Meaningful People podcast. It is what the New York Post reported when it described UH volunteers arriving “well before IDF troops.” It is what the State of Tel Aviv podcast meant when it wrote that “only United Hatzalah volunteers travelled deep into the heart of darkness.”
According to the Israeli State Comptroller, those helicopters transported eight patients.
In June 2026, the Comptroller published a special audit (full document below) of the medical response on October 7, based on data from the Ministry of Health, Magen David Adom, the IDF, and United Hatzalah itself. Since October 7, Beer has appeared on major American podcasts, given interviews to the New York Post and the Jerusalem Post, addressed Republican Jewish leaders, and raised hundreds of millions of dollars. The audit is a dry document. It is also a devastating one.
Take the helicopters. Beer described his two aircraft flying back and forth, rescuing hundreds of people. The Comptroller tracked every civilian helicopter flight that day. United Hatzalah’s helicopters performed three field evacuations and two inter-hospital transfers. Eight patients in total. Not hundreds. Eight. That is not a rounding error or a methodological dispute. It is a gap of two orders of magnitude, and it has been the centerpiece of fundraising appeals to Jewish communities across North America for more than two years.
The patient count has the same problem. Beer told the Jerusalem Post that United Hatzalah treated an estimated 12,000 people on October 7. On a separate podcast, he put the figure at “over two and a half thousand.” The Comptroller’s hospital intake data shows that approximately 1,340 people were evacuated to hospitals nationwide by every organization combined: MDA, United Hatzalah, the military, private vehicles, all of them. United Hatzalah’s own documented contribution was roughly 100 ambulance evacuations. The 12,000 figure, as the Jerusalem Post itself noted, includes panic attacks, heart attacks, and traffic accidents from across the entire country. Those are not October 7 massacre casualties. Presenting them as such is not a misunderstanding. It is a choice.
Then there is the Berdichevsky twins story. On The Ben Shapiro Show, Beer claimed that United Hatzalah volunteers were embedded with Yamam, Israel’s elite counter-terrorism unit, during the rescue of the twins in Kfar Aza. The Comptroller’s report contains no mention of civilian volunteers embedding with Yamam. More tellingly, Beer himself told a different version of the same story on the Inspiration for the Nation podcast, correctly crediting the Golani Brigade with the rescue. Two versions of the same story, one of them told to a much larger audience, and they do not match.
The “before the IDF” framing deserves its own examination because it has become the foundation of how United Hatzalah explains its independent operation that day. The Comptroller’s timeline is not ambiguous. The IDF and security forces were in combat from 06:29. Magen David Adom had volunteers stationed inside the Gaza Envelope communities and had requested helicopter evacuation by 06:57, less than 30 minutes after the attack started. Civilian medical teams were kept out of active combat zones not because the state was absent, but because the IDF told them to stage at perimeter points for their own safety. They were held back not because there was a vacuum, but because there was a war.
The fundraising calls told a different story. On an emergency Zoom call on the day of the attack itself, Beer asked donors for $10 million for an emergency reserve fund: “I need $10 million. I think if we raise more than $10 million it will be blessed.” On that same call, a moderator told attendees that “there really is no alternative that the IDF is using for medical support.” Beer was on the call and said nothing to correct it. Five days later, on a solidarity call with Palm Beach Synagogue donors on October 12, he told the room: “We just ordered $50 million worth of equipment, so we need the funds to pay for it.”
That $50 million figure is worth sitting with. Beer announced it five days after an attack in which, according to the Comptroller, United Hatzalah transported roughly 100 patients by ambulance and 8 by helicopter. Equipment orders of that scale may well reflect genuine operational needs across UH’s broader network of volunteers and communities, and the organization has since grown substantially. But the timing and the framing of the announcement, made on a donor solidarity call built around inflated accounts of what had just happened, raises a straightforward question: how much of that order was driven by actual operational requirements, and how much was driven by the fundraising moment?
None of this is an argument against the bravery of individual United Hatzalah volunteers. People ran toward gunfire. People treated the wounded under impossible conditions. That is true and it matters. But it is a separate question from whether the organization’s leadership accurately described what happened, and the answer to that second question is clearly no. The two things keep getting conflated, and that conflation is not accidental. It is the mechanism by which the inflated numbers survive scrutiny.
The Comptroller’s most pointed finding is not about the numbers at all. It is about how United Hatzalah operated. On October 7, MDA set up a triage point. UH set up a separate one a few kilometers away. Neither knew the other existed. Volunteers drove into active combat zones against dispatch orders. Helicopters flew in violation of a military no-fly order. The Comptroller found that this violated a 2014 memorandum of understanding between UH and MDA, a 2014 Ministry of Health circular, and a 2022 police directive, all of which required United Hatzalah to operate under MDA command during mass casualty events. Beer has held this up as proof of UH’s initiative and readiness. The Comptroller calls it a regulatory failure that fractured the national emergency response at the worst possible moment.
The Israeli state’s own audit has received almost no attention in the English-language press that spent two years amplifying Beer’s version of events. Whatever one thinks of the State Comptroller’s broader role in Israeli politics, the methodology here is not complicated: it examined flight logs, hospital intake records, and organizational communications, and it counted. The count does not match the story. That gap deserves the same platform the story got.
Here’s the full report:
