“It’s actually a place of silence,” says military rabbi Haim Weisberg, tilting his head back and closing his eyes for a brief moment. Then he looks back at one of the open refrigerated containers in which the black and white body bags of the more than 1,400 victims left behind by Hamas’ bloody terrorist attack on Israel on October 7th are piled up. “But how can one remain silent in the face of this horror?”
He pauses again briefly, then continues speaking. “These are women and little girls who were raped in their pajamas and then brutally slaughtered,” says the military rabbi. “We are still collecting the bodies of this massacre from our streets. We see with our own eyes what they did to them. Hamas is not like the Islamic State. She’s worse than that.”
Weisberg is at the Shura military base in Ramle, about 20 kilometers northeast of Tel Aviv. He wears the olive green uniform of the Israeli army and a patterned yarmulke on his head. As a military rabbi, Weisberg has been responsible for the identification, autopsy and burial of soldiers according to Jewish regulations for years. He is used to dealing with death. But even he can hardly find words for what has happened here since October 7th. “They are sights that no one can bear,” he says. “But they are things the world needs to know about.”
More than 700 funerals
Countless vans and ambulances carrying the dead have arrived at the military base in recent weeks; the sheer mass of bodies had already far exceeded the capacity of the National Center for Forensic Medicine hours after the terrorist attack on October 7th. Since then, Weisberg, along with hundreds of military personnel and volunteers, has been trying to match the dead men, women and children who arrive here with a previous life.
They take tissue samples, examine dentures, compare DNA. They work from dawn to dusk in this place, which is saturated with the acrid smell of corpses, seven days a week, including Saturday, the Jewish Shabbat. Only when the dead have been identified here can they be handed over to their families and buried. As of this Thursday alone, more than 700 funerals have taken place across the country. “We have already accomplished a lot,” says Rabbi Weisberg. “But we have to keep going. The others also expect an answer from us.”
Military Rabbi Haim Weisberg
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Image: Omer Messinger
The “others” that the military rabbi speaks of are all those who, almost three weeks after the Hamas attack, still have no certainty about the fate of their daughters, fathers and grandmothers. Some of the missing people may still be alive and are among the more than 200 people abducted by Hamas to Gaza.
Others are among the bodies still being recovered daily from the rubble of raided kibbutzim in the south. The rest are most likely here, at the military base in Ramle. Stowed away on hardware store shelves, more than 200 bodies are still in refrigerated containers waiting to be named. But it is a difficult process. In some cases, they say here, a sheer impossibility.
Many were mutilated
“Hamas did everything to ensure that we couldn’t identify the bodies,” says Weisberg. He reports eyes being cut out with knives, limbs and genitals being severed. He is now standing in front of another refrigerated container in which smaller plastic bags are stacked. They contain body parts of children that have not yet been identified. “They massacred innocent people beyond recognition,” Weisberg said. He speaks in Hebrew and has to pause every now and then between each sentence. The soldier who translates into English for him is also fighting back tears. Typically, they identified corpses by their faces or teeth, the rabbi explains. “But even of those who at least still had a head, many had crushed skulls or knocked out teeth.”