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"Not One Girl Could Be Shown to Her Parents": The Horrors of Oct. 7
(Telegraph-UK) Allison Pearson - Shari Mendes, 63, an architect, switched on her phone on Oct. 7 to find an emergency call-up order. She had never done military service because she was born and brought up in the U.S., only moving to Israel in 2003 to raise her family. A few years ago, however, she had been approached to be part of a small, all-female unit which would help take care of the bodies of women soldiers in the event of a mass casualty event. In the Jewish tradition, it is women who prepare female bodies for burial. As more young women were seeing frontline service, the army thought it was a necessary precaution. That night, Shari drove to the Shura army base and joined her unit. "There were refrigerator trucks lining up as far as you could see. There's this massive intake area like an airport hangar and it was packed with bodies, body bags stacked one on top of each other right up the walls. Hundreds of bodies. The smell was incomprehensible....There was blood on the floor, so much blood." "Most of the people in my unit have no medical background. We're normal people, like secretaries or lawyers or retail workers, whatever. And suddenly there we were dealing with things that no one ever thought you could deal with." The women were shot many times in the head. "Why? Why? We saw that these women were shot to be killed, maybe in the heart, in the head, but then they were shot many times in the face, and it looked like systematic mutilation because it seemed like they wanted to ruin these women's faces." "A lot of them were young soldier women, and a lot of them had been very beautiful. The first few we saw weren't too bad because they might have been caught in their sleep and Hamas just shot them. But, after a while, we got women who had clearly been awake when they were murdered and these women came in and their mouths, their teeth were in grimaces and their hands were clenched, if they had hands." "We got notified that a woman's coming in and she has no legs, so the terrorist cut off her legs. There was clearly immense sadistic violence." A lot of the women had bloody, stained underwear, Shari says, some had no underwear at all. "People were shot in the breast, they were shot in the crotch, and that was not done to kill them." One body Shari dealt with personally still had a knife stuck through her mouth. Of all the young women whose bodies she took care of and prepared for burial, how many were in a fit state to be shown to their parents? "None," Shari says. "Not one girl we could show to her parents."