More than 1,000 people have been killed in Hamas attacks in Israel. Forensics are on constant duty to examine the dead. They report traces of torture and rape.
Note: This article describes several forms of torture and killing.
Since the terrorist attacks by the radical Islamic Hamas in Israel more than a week ago, in which more than 1,300 people were killed, the country’s forensic experts have been working at full speed to investigate the numerous victims. Forensic teams from the Israeli military say they found numerous traces of torture, rape and other atrocities.
According to the Reuters news agency, around 1,300 bodies were taken to an army base in central Israel, where special teams are investigating the identities of the dead and the circumstances of their deaths. Reporters were allowed to visit the base.
Hundreds of soldiers, women and children lay in body bags in the backs of refrigerated trucks, the Associated Press (AP) news agency reported. The bodies were coming faster than the military rabbinate’s rabbis could identify them. The Military Rabinat of the Armed Forces of Israel is responsible for all religious aspects of soldiers, including identification and burial of killed soldiers.
Forensic scientists in Israel even work on the Sabbath
Even on Saturday, the Sabbath, the military rabbis continued to work tirelessly to count and examine the bodies. “Generally speaking, Jewish law says you can’t break the Sabbath for a dead person,” said Rabbi Israel Weiss, a former army chief rabbi who oversees the identification of the dead. “The exception is when a family is in doubt and the death is so serious that it could endanger the life of the family. Then work must be done on the Sabbath to identify the body and give the family answers.” As chief military rabbi from 2000 to 2006, Weiss was responsible for identifying fallen Israeli soldiers and organizing their funerals.
Rabbis have not worked on the Sabbath since 2005, Weiss said, when the rabbinate dug graves in a cemetery in an Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip that had been vacated by residents as part of the Israeli withdrawal.
About 90 percent of the military dead have been identified, and teams have identified half of the civilians, Weiss said over the weekend. Many bodies showed signs of torture and rape, the rabbi said. Men, women and children were burned alive or beheaded. Toes and fingers were cut off.
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“We saw dismembered corpses with arms and feet chopped off, people decapitated, a child decapitated,” a reserve officer named Avigayil said, according to Reuters. There were also several cases of rape.
“We are carrying out identification using all means at our disposal,” a military dentist named Maayan told the news agency. “We see them in a serious state of abuse. We see shots and we see signs that indicate torture.”
“I can’t describe to you in words what it’s like to see a pregnant woman whose stomach has been cut open and her baby ripped out,” Weiss told the online magazine Politico. “I only knew something like that from the Nazis.”
However, military personnel overseeing the identification process did not provide any forensic evidence in the form of images or medical documents, Reuters further reported.
Identification of victims difficult due to lack of DNA samples
Teams of reservists, some as young as their early 20s, are working around the clock to identify the bodies, according to the AP. Before the attack, some of them worked as dentists, others were students.
“The reservists go home at night and try to suppress what they saw here,” Maayan, a 40-year-old dentist from Tel Aviv who works on a team that identifies women’s bodies, told the news agency. She reported that during one of her shifts, she opened a body bag and found one of her former patients staring at her. “No one should have to see what we see here and what we will always see,” she said through tears.
Journalists report while members of the Israeli forensic teams and soldiers show the bodies of the Israeli victims to the press
© Thomas COEX / AFP
Some bodies were so disfigured that they could not be identified, one of the workers told the AP. Every corpse must be subjected to a DNA test. This is made more difficult by the fact that the military does not have a DNA database for civilians. That’s why, the news agency said, many families in Israel have flocked to hospitals to provide DNA samples in the hope that it will help identify their loved ones.
Identification could take weeks or months
“The State of Israel will do everything in its power, money and resources to identify every fallen soldier and citizen,” Weiss said. “Until we reach the point where no mother has to cry at the grave of her son or daughter because she has the slightest doubt that it couldn’t be them.”
But it could still be weeks, if not months, before all the victims of the Hamas attack are identified. Many corpses would still be piling up. “It never ends,” says Avigayil. At the end of the day, she said, her team speaks with psychologists and social workers to try to process the day’s horrors. “We thought we were prepared, but we weren’t. The smell of death is everywhere.”
The staff even decided against the ritual cleaning of the corpses according to Jewish law. “We don’t perform the ritual on the people who were murdered,” she said. “Anyone who has died in this way is already considered clean.”
Some of the bodies have since been taken to Mount Herzl, Israel’s national cemetery in Jerusalem, AP reported. Soldiers would guard the freshly dug graves. Graves, of which there will be many more in the next few weeks.
Sources: News agencies Associated Press, Reuters and AFP (via Yahoo! News), “Politico”, Israel Defense Forces Military Rabbinate