Cremated Beyond Identification

"It’s hell. I can’t imagine that people have to see the results of terrorists’ atrocities."

"Trucks full of bodies have arrived here. One was filled with just children. I can’t describe what we have seen – Jewish families burnt while embracing each other and having to be separated."

"People, babies, without heads. Soldiers with damage from bombs and bullets. It was like a butcher shop, victims in plastic bags but with horrible smells."

"On Monday, I was asked to volunteer to take families looking for the bodies of their loved ones in the morgue. I had no experience at this."

Social worker Adi Skandrion

LUCIEN LUNG/RIVA-PRESS FOR LE MONDE

 There is no opportunity to take a break, bodies keep arriving at the Abu Kabir morgue. These are not the types of cadavers that are usually delivered to the morgue. These are bodies that are rarely intact, bodies burnt beyond recognition, reflecting the scale and sadistic brutality of the attack on southern Israel by Hamas. There are some 200 bodies of the total of over 1,400 dead -- children, women, the elderly, soldiers that forensic pathologists have not yet been capable of identifying, given their state of mutilation or incineration.

Damage so utterly severe making the task beyond complex. So much so that the Israeli government has resorted to asking archaeologists to help in collecting bone fragments from the attack sites. Chen Kugel, director of the national forensic centre where the morgue is located, described the condition of many of the bodies brought to the morgue: "Like coal". There are new discoveries of human remains on a daily basis, almost a month after the attack.

Israeli soldiers are retrieving more bodies during military operations in Gaza. Search-and-rescue teams comb fields, homes and military barracks targeted in the October 7 attack whose scale and level of barbarity still stuns the minds of Israel's population and its government. Despite distinctive details sometimes revealed by autopsies, experts struggle to identify the dead; a man with a metal forearm plate, a woman with a mastectomy scar, still unnamed.

The issue of foreign workers for whom a DNA match is not yet possible for identification purposes. And the anomalous situations where the bodies forensic pathologists believed at first were those of Israelis, turning out to be Hamas operatives. The morgue which sits off a main Tel Aviv thoroughfare receives refrigerated truck deliveries; in one were six bodies; three white body bags and three black, each with its serial number printed on a pink tag to be wheeled on stretchers into the morgue.

Since the attack, Israeli authorities have been unable to accurately say how many people were murdered, how many abducted by Hamas, with fluctuating numbers almost daily, partially based on intelligence and on forensic reports. In the confusion, a third category of victims has been established; those who are missing. Some of the bodies may be at the Abu Kabir morgue or one of two other morgues outside Tel Aviv operated by the military and police.

Many of the victims so extensively and deeply incinerated making DNA extraction virtually impossible. Caused by Hamas terrorists setting fire to homes and barracks to kill anyone trapped inside. Entire families were murdered in other instances, making it difficult to find survivors to claim the dead. Relatives are asked to donate DNA, also asked to bring dental records, toothbrushes to assist with identification of the missing.

"I've never seen this many bodies essentially cremated in a single event". commented Tal Simmons, a forensic anthropologist from Virginia Commonwealth University who volunteered at the centre and has had experience working in war zones around the world. The communities devastated by Hamas are being combed by teams of search-and-rescue workers for traces of human remains. "There's so little left. Every piece of ash could help", explained Simcha Graiman, a worker with Zaka, a volunteer Israeli rescue organization.

There are other bodies being recovered by Israeli soldiers during Gaza operations. Some seem to have been dropped by Hamas while they fled back across the border fence into Gaza, while others appear to have fallen out of pickup trucks while being driven into Gaza.

 

Burial of a victim of the October 7, 2023, attacks at the Har HaMenuchot cemetery, also known as Givat Shaul, in Jerusalem, October 15, 2023. LUCIEN LUNG/RIVA-PRESS FOR LE MONDE