Amit Mann’s Final Calls Resurface, Sparking Demand for Centralized Oct. 7 Records

Three years after paramedic Amit Mann, 22, was killed by Hamas while treating the wounded in Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7, newly aired recordings of her final calls reveal fresh, harrowing details about her last hours.

Aired by Channel 12 on Tuesday, the recordings prompted her sister, Haviva Mann Izikson, to renew her appeal for a centralized system ensuring families are not left searching for similar records years later.

The calls capture Amit repeatedly contacting emergency services as Hamas terrorists overran Be’eri, seeking help while continuing to treat wounded residents.

The previously unknown calls surfaced by chance earlier this year, when Mann Izikson contacted Magen David Adom for the precise times of Amit’s Oct. 7 calls while updating a presentation about her sister. MDA provided details on seven calls; until then, the family knew of only four.

Mann Izikson said hearing the recordings revealed that what Amit endured was “even worse than we had thought” and highlighted how Amit continued caring for others as the situation deteriorated.

“It showed me even more both the hell she endured and who she was,” Mann Izikson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “What she went through was even worse than we thought, yet despite it all, she kept treating the wounded in every way she could.” She spoke as she prepared to return to Be’eri for a memorial at the dental clinic where Amit was killed.

The recordings trace Amit’s increasingly desperate attempts to summon help as terrorists closed in around the dental clinic. Hours later, she sent her sisters a chilling final message: “They’re here, in the clinic. I don’t think I’ll make it out. I love you.”

In one call, Amit struggled to convey the scale of the situation to a police dispatcher.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” she told the dispatcher, describing the wounded and dead around her and continued gunfire. She asked if the army or police had reached the kibbutz. When the dispatcher told her help was coming and urged her to stay inside, Amit began to cry: “Just tell me you’re here.”

Hours later, at 10:41 a.m., after seven calls to Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency medical service, Amit made her final recorded call to police: “Listen, terrorists have infiltrated Be’eri! We urgently need an ambulance or police here. Come urgently to the dental clinic.”

Hearing the latest recordings was heartbreaking, Mann Izikson said. She was struck by Amit’s ability to pull herself together after desperate calls for help and return to caring for the wounded—comforting them, asking about their families, bringing water, and improvising with what little was available. Amit placed helmets beneath their heads and covered those cold from blood loss.

“She kept them alive until her final moments and stayed true to herself until her last breaths,” Mann Izikson said. “It just amazed us.”

A Push to Gather All October 7 Documentation

Mann Izikson is urging the state to establish a central body to collect all existing Oct. 7 documentation—recordings held by emergency services and police, security-camera footage, and other material—catalogue it by victim, and contact each family. Such a body, she said, should ask relatives: “We have documentation of your loved one. Would you like to receive it?”

“If the family wants it, all of it should be provided proactively,” she added.

She pointed to the family of Gil Buyum, 55, a member of Be’eri’s security squad whom Amit treated after he was shot. In one call, Amit reported him wounded; in a later call, she reported his death.

The two recordings allowed Buyum’s widow, Ayelet, to narrow down the time of her husband’s death, Mann Izikson said. Buyum’s 22-year-old son, Inbar “Buri” Buyum, was also killed defending the kibbutz that morning.

“Only because of Amit’s recordings was she able to identify the 20-minute window in which he died,” Mann Izikson said. “That’s just one example of how such material can provide closure.”

She said families should decide for themselves whether they want such material. “It belongs to the families. It is their material, and they should decide what, if anything, to do with it.”

A law passed in July established an Oct. 7 Memory Authority, slated to include an archive and centralize documentation of the attack. The law is due to take effect in January, but it remains unclear whether the authority will match material to individual victims and notify their families.

JTA was unable to reach the Prime Minister’s Office and the Israel State Archives, the government body responsible for preserving state records, in time for publication.

Merav Israeli-Amarant, CEO and co-founder of the Civil Commission on Oct. 7 Crimes by Hamas, which released a major report in May documenting sexual violence during the attack, said Mann Izikson’s proposal was “profoundly important.”

“Families should not have to discover, years later and by chance, that recordings, footage, or other documentation connected to their loved ones exist,” Israeli-Amarant told JTA. She said there should be a mechanism that “approaches families with sensitivity,” allowing them to choose whether to “receive it, view it, preserve it, or not engage with it at all.”

But Israeli-Amarant also noted a “unique importance” in preserving such material through civilian institutions, observing that many Oct. 7 families feel abandoned by the state and prefer documentation handled independently and “outside political considerations.”

Maya Gan-Zvi, manager of the National Library of Israel’s Bearing Witness: October 7 Archive, which has collected hundreds of thousands of files from the attack, cautioned that proactively approaching families, as Mann Izikson proposes, raises ethical questions because families differ widely in how—and whether—they want to encounter such material.

“Some want to receive everything, and some do not want to know, or not yet,” Gan-Zvi told JTA, adding that even members of the same family may disagree. Contacting a family without knowing their wishes could “reopen wounds,” she said, particularly in cases involving graphic material or footage filmed by terrorists.

Gan-Zvi favors a system where bereaved families take the initiative, registering to be contacted, specifying the types of material they want, and receiving a description of what has been found before deciding whether to obtain it.

According to Israeli-Amarant, any system would face “significant” practical and legal hurdles because Oct. 7 material is scattered among government bodies, emergency services, police, the military, media outlets, and private individuals, raising questions of ownership, privacy, consent, and victims’ families’ rights.

Some recordings or footage may also be evidence in ongoing investigations or criminal proceedings against Hamas terrorists, she said, making chain of custody, publication restrictions, and the integrity of those proceedings additional considerations.

Mann Izikson said providing documentation would help answer unresolved fundamental questions.

“Three years later, we still don’t know the full truth or understand how this happened,” she said. “Every piece of material like this can shed another bit of light.”

She has listened to the newly aired recordings repeatedly, echoing a pattern she described to JTA on the first anniversary of the attack, when she said she reread Amit’s Oct. 7 messages daily to piece together what happened during her sister’s final hours and come to terms with it.

It took two and a half days for Amit’s body to be identified. Mann Izikson told JTA that when her sister was lowered into the grave, “I felt like they were burying half of my own child. I wanted to go in instead of her.”

Even amid the war, the hostage crisis, and wider grief in Israel on the first anniversary of Oct. 7, Mann Izikson said Amit’s loss eclipsed everything else. “There is all the rest—and the rest is painful and scary,” she said. “And then there is Amit and nothing else at all.”

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