The Ashdod hotline of the Magen David Adom ambulance service receives hundreds of crank calls every day, mostly from Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip who call the emergency 101 number, curse the operator, and then hang up, says hotline director Yehuda Gabai.
More disturbingly, the callers will report a fictitious emergency, hoping that MDA will waste valuable time and resources.
In response, a new telephone system will allow MDA to define a list of “problematic” telephone numbers from which crank calls have been placed and automatically block the calls.
