Israeli soldiers carry the flag-covered coffin of a person killed in the Hamas attack earlier this month. Rabbis and reservists have worked around the clock at a military base in Israel to identify and count the dead.
Francisco Seco/AP
Warning, this story contains descriptions of atrocities committed against civilians.
TEL AVIV, Israel — On an army base south of Tel Aviv, the sun is sinking behind low clouds as the smell of eucalyptus fills the air.
A man in uniform wearing a kippah is heading towards the place where remains of people killed in the massacre by the militant group Hamas on October 7 have been brought for identification.
“I ask you to respect this place. I ask you to respect the dead,” says a member of the Israel Defense Forces, Lehi, who is only authorized to give her first name.
She says she wants people from all over the world to see something that medical examiners, doctors and rabbis have been bearing witness to over the last week.
“We as a people can’t remain silent for something like this,” Colonel Chaim Weissberg, the head rabbi of the IDF for nearly 20 years, says through a translator.
Usually when a Jew dies, a family member says a prayer called the mourner’s kaddish for the dead.
“The regular way would be for a child to say kaddish, this prayer, for his parents,” Rabbi Weissberg says. “But here we have entire families that no one’s going to be able to say kaddish for them.”
More than 1,000 bodies have been brought here. Truck after truck full of human remains of those murdered when Hamas stormed across the…
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