|
Trending Topics
|
They Spent Weeks Identifying the Dead after Oct. 7
(Ha'aretz) Tom Levinson - One after another, the trucks entered the base. Then the doors opened. Piles of dead bodies, one on top of the other, and intertwined. This was the scene at the Sde Teiman army base a few days after Oct. 7. While the bodies of soldiers and civilians were brought to the Shura army base in central Israel, the bodies of people thought to be terrorists were brought to Sde Teiman. According to Naor Paz, a reservist, one time, the body of a member of a community's security squad was found. He had apparently taken the Kalashnikov off a dead terrorist and himself fell in battle. In another case, the body of an Israeli woman was found among bodies of Gazans removed from a vehicle that, on Oct. 7, was hit by a combat helicopter while on its way back to the Strip. Paz said that in a search for several people classified as missing, "We had to tear the shirts off the bodies and take everything out of the pockets, because some [Gazans] had stolen things from Israelis. We found necklaces, wallets, maps of kibbutzim, soldiers' IDs." And there were also weapons: grenades, magazines and explosives. During this round, remains of two Israeli civilians and two foreign nationals were found: an agricultural worker from Thailand and an asylum seeker from Eritrea. A special unit was responsible for extracting remains from burned vehicles. "They used special vacuums," one officer says. "The ash was taken for DNA tests. Several mysteries were solved that way. Israelis, that's all that was left of them: a little ash." There were also bodies of five Gazan workers who were in Israel on Oct. 7 and were murdered by Hamas.