Forensic pathologists in Israel are struggling to identify the hundreds of bodies recovered in the aftermath of the horrific terror attacks perpetrated by Hamas over the last ten days — some of which have been rendered “unrecognizable” by the brutality of the attacks.
A number of forensic pathologists have spoken out about their experiences over the last week, with even those who have decades of experience in the field saying that they have never seen anything so horrible.
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We interviewed the experts who conducted autopsies on the bodies of Hamas massacre victims.
“I’ve never seen people that are conjoined together while they are burned trying to hug each other.”#Hamas_is_ISIS pic.twitter.com/hZy0s4hNgl
— Israel ישראל 🇮🇱 (@Israel) October 15, 2023
Dr. Chen Kugel, head of the Israel National Center of Forensic Medicine, showed the burned body of an adult who had been killed by Hamas while hiding in a shelter — and explained how he could tell that the victim had been burned alive.
“We see here one of the cases which is an example of the atrocities that we have seen in the tragic event and in Israel,” Kugel began, keeping his tone even and his words clinical. “This is a burned body, of course, of an adult. But we know that he was burned while he was alive because we can see soot in the trachea of this person.”
“They couldn’t shoot him because he was inside a shelter,” Kugel continued. “So they burned the house, so everybody that was inside was burned while he was alive. And this is only one example of many atrocities and many horrible, horrific things that we are seeing here in this tragedy that happened to Israel.”
“I’m 31 years a forensic pathologist. I’m used to seeing dead people, but I never saw people that are conjoined together while they are burned trying to hug each other,” Kugel said, and his voice broke as he tried to rein in his emotions. “I — I’m sorry. Stop.”
According to a report published on Monday by The Daily Mail, there are still nearly 300 bodies that have been so badly burned or brutalized in the Hamas terrorist attacks that they have not yet been identified – and the forensic pathologists who have been tasked with identifying them are stressed to the breaking point.
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Kugel told The Daily Mail that some victims were so badly burned that it took CT scans to reveal that what they believed was one body was actually two.
“You can tell from the shapes of their spines that it is an adult and a child, and they are sitting together and they are hugging tightly together. In their final moments. They were burnt to death like this. Cremated alive in their own home, clutching one another,” Kugel explained, crying throughout the interview. “This is heart-wrenching and difficult to see, even for people like me who have been doing this for so many years.”
Kugel also confirmed the widespread reports of beheaded Israeli babies — and adults — saying that he had seen bodies without heads but could not say whether they had been cut off by swords or by shrapnel from rockets or grenades.
“We are working in the world of the dead in there. But when I come out here, to the living world, and I talk with you and the sun is shining, it’s like normal … except it is not,” Kugel told The Daily Mail.