A rescue worker in Israel reports unimaginable scenes on site after the massacre by Hamas terrorists. “We thought we were strong, we thought we had seen everything, but we were convinced otherwise,” Avigdor Stern told the German Press Agency. The 39-year-old is one of hundreds of volunteers from the Zaka rescue service who have been helping for days in the border area with the Gaza Strip to completely recover the dead in order to pay their last respects. He and his colleagues drove to the villages in the border area and found kilometers of devastation. “At that moment our lives changed forever,” said Stern, who lived as a rabbi in Konstanz on Lake Constance for several years. “Such a mass of corpses, a corpse and another corpse and another corpse”says Stern. There were so many that the body bags weren’t enough. They had to be requested from all over Israel. “There were trucks full of corpses,” says Stern, describing the scenes on site. “Women, men, children, babies, I can’t even explain it.”
In the Jewish faith, every part of a body must be buried, Stern explains. This is how people are paid their last respects. This is Zaka’s job. “We knew we couldn’t stop, we knew we had to do this now.”