The Israeli army is making use of DNA and dental imprints to determine victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. NPR’s Ari Shapiro visits an Israeli Army base south of Tel Aviv where by this get the job done is taking put.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
We’re on an military foundation south of Tel Aviv, and the sunshine is sinking driving lower clouds as a odor of eucalyptus fills the air. A gentleman in uniform donning a kippah is top us to see this location that the remains of people who were killed in the massacre have been introduced for identification.
LIHI: I inquire you to regard this area. I inquire you to regard the useless.
SHAPIRO: Like quite a few users of the Israel Protection Forces, Lihi (ph) is only approved to give us her 1st identify. She desired journalists from all about the globe to see a little something that health care examiners, medical doctors and rabbis have been bearing witness to above the last 7 days. And a warning – the descriptions her colleagues gave are graphic and not acceptable for some listeners.
HAIM WEISBERG: (By way of interpreter) We as a persons can not stay silent for a thing like this.
SHAPIRO: Colonel Haim Weisberg is head rabbi of the IDF. A armed service spokesman named Daveed (ph) interprets for him. Rabbi Weisberg has put in approximately 20 years in his placement. He says normally when a Jew dies, a relatives member claims a prayer called the Mourner’s Kaddish for the lifeless.
WEISBERG: (Via interpreter) The standard way would be for a youngster to say Kaddish, this prayer for his mothers and fathers. But below, we have full people that no one’s going to be able to say Kaddish for them.
SHAPIRO: A lot more than a thousand bodies have been brought here – truck following truck full of human continues to be, persons who were murdered when Hamas stormed throughout the border from Gaza into Israel on October 7. Rabbi Weisberg breaks down as he describes in element the problems some of the bodies arrived in – burned and mutilated.
WEISBERG: (By means of interpreter) Young ladies, aged females raped, troopers and citizens whose heads had been chopped off.
SHAPIRO: Lots of of the individuals figuring out and caring for the useless are army reservists. They have working day jobs as civilians. But since the attack, they’ve been listed here – like a dentist named Mayon (ph). She identifies people’s remains by their dental imprints.
MAYON: Next to that identification (ph) area, when we consider put, there is loved ones room to say goodbye to the liked types, to say their very last goodbye. So whilst figuring out, we can listen to the screams, and we can listen to the cries of a girl burying her kid, of kid losing his mom and dad and continue to be often. And we hear the cry, and we hear the screams, and we are still pinpointing tirelessly, uncompromisingly
