At the end of last month, with fighting between Gaza and Israel already in full swing, Israeli medic Moshe "Moshon" Vaknin drove an ambulance to the Erez Crossing, between Israel and Gaza, and got ready to evacuate an injured Palestinian child.

While Israeli mortars were fired on one side, and bullets passing overhead from the other, Vaknin risked his life to bring the Palestinian child out of Gaza and take him to an Israeli hospital for life-saving treatment. Vaknin is the deputy director for the south district at Magen David Adom (MDA) which is Israel's version of the Red Cross.

He's brought out two more wounded Palestinian children for treatment in Israeli hospitals since then, and last week was one of a team of medics who drove in to the checkpoint, the most dangerous in Israel and possibly the Middle East, in a special bulletproof ambulance to rescue Palestinian truck drivers, hired by the United Nations, and attacked while delivering humanitarian aid.

"It's unbelievably dangerous. It's crazy. The scariest place," says Vaknin, who took the injured truck drivers to Barzilai Hospital in Israel, and normally never goes so deep inside the checkpoint.

Over the last four years in Vaknin's job working for the MDA he has helped bring thousands of sick and injured Palestinian children and adults from the Gaza strip to Israeli hospitals for vital medical care, often on a daily basis.

It was a dangerous job even before the current conflict began. It was so dangerous that his wife simply "doesn't want to know about it." Hamas sniper fire and rockets have been aimed many times at both Vaknin and the Palestinian patients he was transporting.

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