Israel Struggling To Identify Many Of The 1,400 Hamas Victims
RAMLA, Israel — Since Hamas’ savage Oct. 7 cross-border assault on multiple army bases, kibbutzim, cities and a music festival near the Gaza Strip, staff at the Israel Defense Forces’ Shura Army Base have been working around the clock to identify the bodies of the 1,100 civilians and 315 soldiers, reservists and police officers massacred by jihadi terrorists.
With so many bodies, the victims were initially kept in refrigerated milk trucks in the morgue’s parking lot. Plain wooden coffins were stacked in the crowded corridors waiting for positive identification so the remains could be released to their families for burial. Only then can Judaism’s seven-day period of mourning begin.
Nearly a month on, the sickly smell of death lingers. Pathologists at this normally quiet IDF logistics center and home base of the military rabbinate corps — located on the outskirts of this mixed Jewish-Arab city not far from Ben-Gurion Airport — continue their pain-staking and harrowing mission.
READ: Collective Trauma From Hamas Attack Will Forever Scar The Jewish People
Dismembered limbs and badly decomposed bodies continue to be delivered. The human remains are sniffed out under the rubble of destroyed buildings by IDF canine units, staffers told a delegation this past Tuesday comprising rabbis and lay leaders from the United States, Canada and Great Britain.
Initially, it is often impossible to determine if the corpses are those of victims or perpetrators, Col. Rabbi Haim Weisberg, head of the IDF’s rabbinic division, said.
Many are mutilated with limbs and heads dismembered, making the ghoulish jigsaw puzzle even more complex.
“We are in an abnormal situation, and that is why it is taking so much time to identify the bodies,” he said. “In most cases, we have had to identify people via deep tissue DNA or dental records because there is nothing left.” The complex identification process has been compounded because so many of the victims were not Israeli residents.
Pathologists can sometimes take several hours to assess a corpse, photograph it and document the fatal wounds. Out of respect for the dead and their families, the IDF is not releasing any photos.
“These are things we have not seen since the Nazis,” the military chaplain noted. “We are seeing trucks arriving with whole families inside — grandparents, mothers, fathers and children — and we are still collecting bodies from the roads, homes, playgrounds and fields where they were killed.”
Col. Weisberg spoke not only about whole bodies, but also about charred and incomplete remains, including what in one case turned out to be a corpse so severely burned that only a CT scan revealed it was actually a mother and baby bound together in a final embrace. In another case, he described a pregnant woman with her stomach slashed open and her fetus ripped out and beheaded — the umbilical cord still attached.
The grisly job is complicated by uncertainty regarding the overall tally of atrocity victims. According to constantly updated data from the IDF, more than 1,400 Israelis and foreigners were murdered in the attack. Some 238 people are believed to be held hostage by Hamas inside the Gaza Strip. That leaves some 30 people whose fates remain unknown.
Some may be held inside the coastal enclave by other terrorist groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad or even by individuals, Israeli officials said. Others may still be among the dead, yet to be identified by the staff at Shura.
A delegation of rabbis was given a tour by Israeli military officials regarding the work around identifying bodies from the Oct. 7 massacre. (Photo by Boaz Pearlstein)
When drafted, all IDF recruits provide samples of their DNA and fingerprints, in addition to having their teeth X-rayed. The army does not rely exclusively on identification made through a soldier’s twin dog tags kept in his combat boots and one worn on a chain around his or her neck.
According to “halacha” (Jewish ritual law), fallen soldiers are buried in a coffin in their blood-soaked uniform. They are not ritually washed in the “tahara” ceremony — the Jewish tradition of purification of the dead — nor are they wrapped in shrouds. The intention is that God should be angered by witnessing the fallen defenders among his Chosen People. Personal effects — like a cell phone, watch or wallet — are washed of blood and returned to the family of the deceased. Artifacts that cannot be cleansed of blood are buried with the body.
By contrast, civilian dead are ritually washed and wrapped in shrouds. As a rule, they are interred directly in the ground without a coffin.
While dental records allow straightforward identification of dead soldiers whose head is found, that information is often unavailable for civilians. Several dental offices in the city of Sderot near Gaza were destroyed, and with them their files.
Ritual washing is tasked to male and female reservists who have volunteered for the mitzvah (Torah commandment) of “chesed shel emet” (true kindness).
Female soldiers perform tahara for the hundreds of girls and women who were murdered. The team is working in shifts around the clock. Among them is Shari, an architect living in Jerusalem whose surname may not be released due to IDF security regulations. She volunteered for the unit when it was established more than a decade ago in order to ensure the modesty of female recruits killed in action was protected.
“We saw evidence of rape,” she said. “Pelvises were broken, and it probably takes a lot to break a pelvis … and this was also among grandmothers down to small children.”
Shari said her and the other volunteers received specialized training from the IDF, which prepared them practically and mentally to care for the bodies of the dead. She had not been called for active duty until the attacks.
“I’ve seen things with my own eyes that no one should ever see,” she said, describing how she took care of the dead women.
Many were still dressed in their pajamas with their heads shot off. Their bodies had been booby-trapped with grenades, and the remains bore evidence of extreme brutality.
Shari’s duties begin with opening the body bags to remove the dead person’s clothes, jewelry and any other personal possessions in order to return them to the families.
“The only color among the blood and dirt was their nails, beautiful manicures, painted the brightest colors,” Shari said, adding, “Their nails made me weep.”
The grisly tour was a chance for Jews around the world to see for themselves the massacre that was perpetrated by Hamas.
“We gathered this group of 33 Jewish communal leaders from across North America to witness the horrors our brothers and sisters have suffered," said Stephen Daniel Arnoff, CEO of the Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center — a home for Conservative and Masorti Judaism in Israel — which organized the three-day solidarity mission.
The group included the first civilians to tour the devastated remains of Kibbutz Be’eri, where terrorists went house to house slaughtering residents. Wearing flak vests and helmets, clergy and communal leaders recited the El Malei Rachamim and Kaddish prayers for the dead as soldiers continued their search for human remains.
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“We literally saw the blood of our people crying out to us from the ground,” Arnoff said. “It is our moral obligation to make sure that the world knows what happened there.”
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Gil Zohar was born in Toronto and moved to Jerusalem in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.