At Shura military base in central Israel, bodies have been coming in faster than the rabbis can identify them. Hundreds of soldiers, women, and children in body bags line shelves of refrigerated trucks, awaiting examination. Identification teams gather on plastic stools opposite the trucks to take smoke breaks between shifts. They wear heavy gas masks — the smell of death is overwhelming.
The process was continuing Sunday and could take months, workers said. Some bodies are so disfigured that they cannot be identified. Each must undergo DNA testing, a task made more difficult by the fact that the military does not have a DNA database for civilians. Only half the civilians have been identified thus far, rabbis said.
“For 12 hours until midnight, we went department by department, bed by bed, and she wasn't there,” said Raz Mualem, Maayan's brother. Rabbis have not worked on the Sabbath since 2005, said Weiss, when the rabbinate disinterred graves from a cemetery in an Israeli settlement in Gaza that residents evacuated as part of Israel's unilateral withdrawal at the time. Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006, and the following year, it seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority.
“The reservists go home at night and try to unsee what they have seen here,” said Capt. Maayan, a 40-year-old dentist from Tel Aviv who works on a team identifying the bodies of women. Maayan, whose last name could not be published under military regulations, said that on one of her shifts she unzipped a body bag to find one of her former patients staring up at her.
“There are still so many bodies piled. It’s endless,” said Senior Staff Sgt. Avigail, who is 48 and from Tel Aviv and once worked at the telephone company. Her team operates in shifts, four women at a time. At the end of the day, Avigail said, her team consults with psychologists and social workers to try to grapple with the horrors of the day.
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