United Hatzalah has to stop advertising its emergency hotline. That is the headline item in a new Ministry of Health directive issued August 3, 2026, and it matters because UH was already told not to do this. The prohibition existed before. The organization advertised anyway. Now the Ministry is reasserting the rule and attaching real consequences to it.
The directive, Circular 3/2026, replaces a 2017 framework that was supposed to govern how Magen David Adom and United Hatzalah work together in operating Israel’s national first-responder network. What the new circular makes clear, in a way the old one apparently did not, is that MDA runs that network. UH operates within it. Those are not the same thing, and the Ministry has spent seven pages spelling out the difference.
MDA is Israel’s national rescue organization, established by law in 1950. It runs the national dispatch center. United Hatzalah, founded in 2006, operates a network of volunteer EMTs, paramedics, and doctors, along with a fleet of motorcycles. On paper, the two organizations have been cooperating for years. In practice, UH had been functioning more and more like an independent emergency service, advertising its own number, running its own dispatch, and sending out its own volunteers. The new circular puts a stop to that.
On the number specifically: all public emergency calls go to MDA. If someone calls UH directly, UH transfers the call to MDA immediately. UH’s dispatch center stays open, but its job is to support MDA’s operation, not to run a parallel one. The circular is explicit that UH must stop any public promotion of its own emergency line. No exceptions are listed.
The dispatch process itself has been redesigned to make clear who is in charge at each step. When MDA identifies UH volunteers as potential responders to an incident, it sends preliminary information to the UH dispatch center. UH reaches out to those volunteers, gets confirmation they can respond, and tells MDA. MDA then officially dispatches them through a new joint mobile application. Once that happens, MDA tracks the UH responders the same way it tracks its own, as part of its command and control operation.
UH dispatch does get one narrow form of input. If it spots a volunteer closer to the scene or better suited for the call that MDA has not identified, it can flag that person to MDA. MDA then decides whether to dispatch them. That is the extent of UH’s independent authority in the process. Nothing goes out without MDA’s sign-off.
The circular also bans the informal information sharing that has been a persistent problem in Israeli volunteer emergency response. No WhatsApp groups. No mass broadcasts. No passing incident details through any channel outside the official dispatch mechanism. The rule is stated flatly and without qualification.
MDA has six months to build a joint mobile application connecting both organizations’ dispatch systems. After that, there is a two-month pilot under Ministry of Health supervision before full rollout. Until the app is ready, MDA will proactively contact UH dispatch for CPR and unconscious-patient calls, asking them to locate and send up to two responders. UH is responsible for making sure no one else shows up.
The accountability section is where the circular gets pointed. Every six months, UH’s Medical Director and organizational head have to submit a declaration, verified by a lawyer, confirming that their active responders meet all training requirements. If UH’s official list of responders does not match who is actually in the field, or if training documentation is missing or incomplete, the Ministry of Health can pull UH’s operating authorization. Not suspend it. Pull it. That consequence is written into the circular, not implied.
MDA has its own reporting obligations. Monthly reports to the Ministry covering incident volumes, which organization each dispatched responder belongs to, and any other data the Ministry requests. A dedicated Ministry supervisor will oversee compliance. Periodic review meetings will include both organizations.
The circular is signed by Director General Moshe Bar Siman Tov. A copy went to the Minister of Health.
What this amounts to is the Ministry putting in writing something that was always supposed to be the case. MDA is the national coordinator. Every other organization in Israel’s first-responder landscape works within that structure. UH has a role in the system, and the circular defines it precisely. What UH does not get to do is advertise its own emergency line, send out its own volunteers without MDA’s involvement, or present itself to the public as a standalone emergency service. The 2017 circular was supposed to establish that. It clearly did not stick. Whether this one does will depend on how seriously the Ministry’s supervisor takes the job.
