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Israel's Forensic Workers Struggle to Put Names to the Dead

(Washington Post) Kevin Sieff - More than three weeks after Hamas' attack on Israel, human remains are being retrieved daily by Israeli soldiers during operations in Gaza. Some appear to have been dropped by militants as they fled across the border fence; others seem to have fallen from pickup trucks. Search-and-rescue teams are combing the fields, homes and military barracks that were targeted. By now they're rarely intact, or are burned beyond recognition. "Like coal" is how Chen Kugel, director of the national forensic center, described many of the bodies he is now seeing. Forensic pathologists have been unable to identify about 200 bodies because they were mutilated or incinerated. Many victims were so badly burned that extracting DNA from their bodies is impossible. In other cases, entire families were murdered, making it difficult to find survivors to claim the dead. On one army base, 15 service members sharing a room were incinerated. Forensic experts wrote the official cause of death in their case files, which enumerated cases of torture and execution. "Laceration of the throat," said one. "Gunshot wound through the cheek from 3 to 5 centimeters," said another. There was a decapitated 10-year-old. Last week, Simcha Graiman, a worker with Zaka, a volunteer Israeli rescue organization, scraped a scorched home in Kibbutz Holit for ashes. After some time, he found a tooth. Using dental records, forensic workers were able to identify the victim.
2023-11-01 00:00:00
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