Sébastien Le Belzic (special correspondent in Tel Aviv)/Photo credits: Sébastien le Belzic
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08:59, October 20, 2023
In Shura, in a military base south of Tel Aviv, hundreds of bodies are still waiting to be identified, fourteen days after Hamas attacks in southern Israel. Doctors and experts face the horror of the terrorist group’s abuses on the bodies of the deceased. Europe 1 went to meet them.
Fourteen days after the Hamas attack on Israel, the bodies of the victims have not yet all been identified. On the Shura military base south of Tel Aviv, hundreds of corpses are piled up in containers. This improvised morgue allows an army of doctors and experts to identify each of the victims of this terrible massacre.
400 bodies have not been identified
Dozens of refrigerated containers are lined up in the middle of the barracks. When Colonel Haim opens the doors of this improvised morgue, the smell is pestilential. “Massacres like these, we haven’t seen them since the Nazis. Who are they to burn, house after house, family after family? What can we say, when we see ambulances full of bags with the pieces of families whole”, he explains at the microphone of Europe 1.
More than 400 bodies have still not been identified. Shir, a military doctor, analyzes the teeth, but the condition of the corpses complicates his work. “I thought I was in a horror movie, for the first time we saw bodies with bullets in their heads and brains blown out, they crushed heads with cars and we saw people burned alive,” she says.
Evidence of rape
Corporal Sherry is responsible for reconstituting the bodies before returning them to the families. “We have had evidence of rapes which were so cruel that the pelvis was broken, the bones were broken, the legs were broken. And this happened to grandmothers as well as to children. These are things that we has views”.
When the container doors close, some of his soldiers cannot hold back their tears.