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Israel's Quest to Identify Every Victim of Hamas Leaves Scientists Exhausted, Traumatized

(Wall Street Journal) David S. Cloud - Three weeks after the bloody massacre that killed 1,400 people in southern Israel, Israel's government forensic laboratory is still inundated with unidentified remains. The pressure to identify the victims has forced the institute onto an emergency footing like none it has seen before. Its staff examines whole cadavers and the tiniest body parts, takes fingerprints, does X-rays and CT scans, removes tissue samples for DNA extraction - all while suppressing the instinct to grieve. As many as 80 Israelis are still missing and many are feared dead, but identifying the remaining victims from the often badly burned and decomposing remains is proving more of a challenge as days pass, officials said. The center has received around 1,500 sets of remains since Oct. 7 - just 500 fewer than it handles in an average year. Of the bodies that still arrive, a growing number are Gazan militants killed in the fighting. Any females are assumed to be victims, since the attackers were all believed to be male. The head of one young girl's corpse examined at the lab was severed from her torso except for a thin flap of skin, according to a photo shown by Dr. Chen Kugel, the director. In other photos, the wrists of burned bodies were bound with cable, indicating they were executed. "Sometimes you look at something and you think it belongs to one person and then you start separating it out and you realize that it is multiple people who were holding each other, close to each other, comforting each other through everything that was happening," said Michal Peer, 29, the institute's staff anthropologist and a Colorado native.
2023-11-03 00:00:00
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