Unseen footage takes viewers inside Soroka on October 7

“You don’t get to look at evil like that and remain the same,” he said.

Hosted by journalists Chen Liberman and Roni Singer, the documentary reconstructs the day through WhatsApp messages, phone records and testimony from doctors, nurses, patients and families.

Three years on, the footage stands as primary evidence of the Hamas massacres: a contemporaneous record of a hospital absorbing the attack as it unfolded.

Codish was at the hospital from early that morning.

“I was at the hospital, preparing for what no one can prepare for,” he told the Report at the premiere. His team, he said, spent the day “trying to figure out what to do minute by minute, because there was no information about how that day was going to develop.”

At first, it looked like the attacks Soroka had handled before. “It probably took a few hours to realize how bad things really were,” Codish said.

Most staff worked for about three days straight. Dozens of wounded soldiers arrived on October 8, and the team first sat down to process what had happened only around midday on October 9.

“It’s not just the people coming in wounded; it’s the families, the missing people,” Codish said. “This was three days of an emotional roller coaster that never ended.”

As the center that received the most critically injured, Soroka also treated returning hostages. Codish recalled an 84-year-old woman who arrived “within an inch of her life,” spent six months recovering, and walked out of the hospital on her own feet.

Regarding the TikTok removal, Codish was blunt. “No one can deny real-life footage. This is not AI. This is what really happened. Unedited. Unfiltered,” he said, noting that blurring the faces of people who had not consented to appear was the only alteration made.

TikTok restored the trailer, he said, “I think the next day,” and attributed the removal to its algorithm. Asked whether the company had apologized, he said: “Not to me.”

According to Liberman, the development process of “The Shift” started only a few months ago, when Soroka brought the footage to KAN, containing “hours of recordings from multiple cameras and angles. The team chose to focus on stories that unfold on camera, and interviewed the doctors and nurses who lived them,” she said.

While producing the documentary, the journalist said, two moments marked her in a way she could never forget. The first one is the frame of a wounded Golani soldier lying in bed when two comrades from his battalion wake him and embrace him. The two then step aside and break down in tears.

The second moment is when a Soroka cleaner arrives at her workplace after learning that her son, a soldier in Golani’s 51st Battalion, has been brought there. The cameras capture her colleagues telling her that he has been killed, and her walking out of the hospital. “The most difficult moment a mother can imagine,” Liberman said.

The TikTok removal, she said, was another frustrating reminder of the reality Israelis face. “How did we get from the worst thing that happened to the Jewish people since the Holocaust to being the ones whose disaster is being denied?”

For some of the doctors in the film, the hardest part has come not during the emergency but in the quiet after it.

Dr. Ori Galante, director of the Internal Medicine Intensive Care Unit at Soroka, compared the return to routine after war to what soldiers face when they come home and confront the gap between the battlefield and the living room. That adjustment, he said, has been far from easy.

The weekend before the premiere was the hardest he has had in three years. Part of it was the film, which forced him to relive that day. Part of it was the quiet: with the war no longer at the hospital’s doors, the hardest questions surface.

What if he had driven south with his family? What if he had gone to the Nova music festival, just 20 minutes away? “I assume we will deal with this our whole lives,” Galante said. “It is layer upon layer upon layer.”

Dr. Shlomo Yaron Ishay, deputy head of cardiothoracic surgery at Soroka, pushed back on the label that followed October 7.

Before the attack, he said, Israeli society felt divided and at war with itself. Then came what he called “a festival of heroes.” At Soroka, he insisted, there were none. “Everyone who was here did their job.”

His first image of that day is of crowds of staff streaming into the hospital from every department. In a mass-casualty event on that scale, he explained, a handful of bottlenecks decide everything, among them the CT scanners and the operating rooms, where someone must decide who goes first.

Many staff left children at home in safe rooms, some with children of their own serving in the army. “I’m sure that if someone had asked them to mop the floor, that is what they would have done,” he said.

Where the medical teams speak of dedication, Herzog said, he calls it heroism. Doctors and nurses do not see themselves as heroes, because this is their profession, he noted, but those outside medicine can never fully grasp how they do it.

The president recalled visiting Soroka after the attack: crowds of people, yet a striking quiet, with Muslims, Christians, and Jews working side by side, each knowing exactly what to do.

“I truly believe the people of Israel have wonderful abilities,” Herzog said, “and that, as hard as this year has been, we can get through this.”■