Forensic teams still working to identify bodies 10 days after Hamas massacres

Forensic anthropologists say many of the 350 human remains they are examining may never be identified

On a table, a jumble of bones and fragments are laid out carefully, some grey, others charred black. A skeleton hangs at the side of the room for reference.

Three forensic anthropologists peer over them with the intent focus of professionals trying to solve the most tragic of puzzles. Their job is to identify some of the most badly damaged remains of victims of the Hamas massacres of 7 October.

The scale of the murder means that more than a week on, over 350 bodies of suspected civilian victims still have not been identified, said Dr Chen Kugel, the director of Israel’s national institute of forensic medicine. There are bodies burned beyond recognition and others that decayed badly before they were found.

Thousands of people are desperately waiting for news of loved ones and for remains they can bury, a particularly urgent concern as Jewish tradition requires a rapid burial, and formal mourning can begin only after the funeral.

Kugel, speaking nine days after the attacks, fears that the rate at which they can give families answers may slow as they reach the most damaged bodies, and some victims may never be identified.

“We did a lot of work in the past nine days … Now we are at a peak, the rate of identification will decline as we are reaching the hard cases,” he said. “I’m afraid there will be some [victims] that we will never find, and we will never be able to identify … People have to be prepared for this.”

The scale of the work is overwhelming, with dozens of bodies – or in some cases collections of human remains so damaged they are barely recognisable – arriving at the forensic institute on Monday in a refrigerated truck.

Carefully labelled, they are autopsied and have samples removed for DNA tests, then sent back for storage because the small centre does not have space for so many corpses.

Israel has only seven forensic pathologists, although Kugel’s small staff has been bolstered by volunteers who have come out of retirement, from the private sector and from abroad.

Michal Peer deals with the bones of victims caught in intense fires, charred and twisted by heat beyond recognition. Her first task is painfully simple; trying to establish how many people were caught in each blaze.

“I look for multiples [of bones],” Peer said. “In this particular case we can say there are at least two individuals included in these remains, because there is particular part of the mandible, the lower jaw, we have a right and a left, and then we found a third one.”

“I have been involved in now five or six cases of burned remains and we are not even close to being finished. There is going to be a lot of it coming up in the days and even weeks ahead.”

CT scans can also help investigators. Kugel showed journalists an image of one burned and almost unidentifiable collection of bones collected from a saferoom in one kibbutz, then a scan of those remains.

In it, two spines and two sets of ribs were visible, one smaller than the other, which he said told a painful story of their deaths. “This is an adult with a child. They are sitting together and hugging,” Kugel said.

The scans can also offer clues as to the cause of death. If there are no metal fragments, they were probably killed by fires. With some less damaged bodies found in burned buildings, soot in the trachea showed that victims were alive when a fire was set and probably died of smoke inhalation, Kugel said. He wants families to know that victims would have died from smoke inhalation before flames reached their bodies.

When the forensic anthropologists have finished, they send a bone sample to a lab, where DNA technicians painstakingly clean them, trying to extract enough material to get a full profile that can be compared with databases of the missing.

Israel’s broad military service requirements mean there are fingerprints and DNA records for many people on record in national databases. Medical records for those reported missing after the attacks are also being opened up to help the process of identification.

The scale of the tragedy has undone Kugel’s professional detachment, cultivated over 30 years and vital to work in forensics, he said. “I am 31 years in this profession and it is still difficult.”

He said some of the painful injuries he had seen included people with gunshot wounds to their heads and backs of their hands, which suggested they were trying to shield their heads as they were killed.

Others in the lab are also struggling, although therapists are on hand to support them. In one lab, a child’s mattress, splattered with dried blood, is propped against a wall.

“They found it without a baby, so they are taking blood samples to find out [whose blood is there],” said Daniel Gourevich, a private sector worker from a company that automates DNA sequencing. “I see that mattress every night when I close my eyes.”

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