‘Nothing prepares you for it’
“We’d walk into a room full of blood and see no sign of shooting or bombing. There, Hamas terrorists didn’t use a gun to kill their victims, they used an axe to chop them into pieces,” said Simcha Greiniman, a 47-year-old veteran ZAKA.Why the full extent of Hamas’s sex crimes may never be known
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of 1,200 people in Israel, 800 ZAKA volunteers have worked around the clock to recover the remains of the dead.
“I am there every day from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. to make sure that these families get the closure they need to properly mourn their loved ones,” Greiniman told JNS.
Founded in 1995, ZAKA deals with instances of unnatural death, and works in close cooperation with emergency services and security forces.
Over 3,000 ZAKA volunteers are currently deployed cross the country, on call 24/7, to respond to terror attacks, accidents or natural disasters. ZAKA With Destroyed Cars, Oct. 7 AttacksZAKA personnel work at a field with destroyed cars from the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, Dec. 12, 2023. Photo by Chaim Goldberg/Flash90.
Greiniman has been volunteering for ZAKA for the past 32 years and oversees groups in charge of conducting Chesed Shel Emes, honoring the dead by bringing bodies to burial, which is considered one of the greatest mitzvot [commandments] in Judaism.
“In the Bible, there is a special need to make sure bodies get a proper burial and that no part, not even blood samples or small bones, are left behind,” explained Greiniman. ZAKA personnel clean blood off the ground at the scene of a suspected terror attack near the entrance to Jerusalem, on Nov. 22, 2022. Two explosions at two bus stops left one person killed and at least another 13 injured. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.
As part of ZAKA International, Greiniman has volunteered both in Israel and overseas in scenarios ranging from natural disasters to accidents and terror attacks. In recent years, ZAKA International flew to Haiti, India, Turkey and Morocco.
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There was little time for investigation, and little expertise to formally identify the crimes Hamas had committed.Israel building biggest case against Hamas since Eichmann trial
But forensic reviews of video footage of the aftermath of the attacks, and dozens of interviews clearly points to a pattern of gender-based violence on Oct 7.
There are believed to be at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted, or mutilated.
Dozens of bodies of women and girls with signs of sexual abuse were found, medics told The New York Times.
Videos of the aftermath are said to show soldiers shot in the vagina, and kibbutz residents with nails driven into their thighs and groin.
The scenes at the rave are some of the most graphic, with reports of Hamas terrorists with hammers gang raping party-goers, and cutting off breasts to throw to each other as they laughed.
Both Mr Otmazgin and Ms Mendes admitted that they were overwhelmed on the day of the attacks and their work was focused on finding survivors or preparing bodies.
Ms Mendes said everyone was in a hurry at the morgue to release the bodies to the families for burial instead of looking for clues about exactly what had happened to them.
“Our main concern, especially in the initial days, was identification so that family members could be notified and only then preparation for burial,” Ms Mendes told the UN earlier this month.
Meanwhile, the means by which bodies were collected from the scene of the atrocities may have hampered evidence records.
Mr Otmazgin recalls how he raced to the festival site on the morning of the terror attacks only to be stopped in the road by an Orthodox Jewish man trying to help recover the scores of dead.
When the man opened the boot of his white Skoda, Mr Otmazgin saw the bodies of two young women, in short shorts and trainers lying next to each other.
Mr Otmazgin swore at the man, and then placed the bodies in the ambulance and drove on south.
He came across some soldiers blocking the way while fighting was still raging.
Overwhelmed, they had rushed to remove some bodies from the party that needed to be collected.
Mr Otmazgin works for Zaka, a volunteer group of ultra-Orthodox men who deploy to mass-casualty events simply to collect bodies as fast as they can. They are not there to investigate.
While evidence of pervasive sexual violence became known among therapy providers, gynaecologists and first responders, the details were not initially widely publicised.
Israel is preparing for the country’s most significant trial since the 1961 court case against Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.I’m a former hostage. What I thought when I saw Hamas release captives
Investigators and prosecutors are compiling a massive amount of evidence for an indictment against the captured Hamas terrorists who participated in the Oct. 7 massacre of some 1,200 persons in the northwestern Negev. Thousands more were wounded and at least 240 kidnapped back to Gaza. Terrorists committed acts of rape, sexual abuse, torture, burning and desecration of corpses.
Some 200 Hamas terrorists were captured in Israel during the Oct. 7 invasion, and additional terrorists are being taken prisoner as the Israel Defense Forces continues its ground offensive against the terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli parliament voted in early December to form a subcommittee that will create a legal framework for the prosecution of Hamas terrorists who participated in the Islamist group’s Oct. 7 massacre.
“The state of Israel has never before dealt with crimes and an investigation on this scale,” Roi Sheindorf, former deputy Israeli attorney general, told the Journal. “This will be one of the most important trials to take place in Israel.”
Ana Diamond works with the Oxford Disinformation and Extremism Lab and the Red Team Network at OpenAI. She is also the co-founder of the Alliance Against State Hostage-taking, having endured over 200 days in solitary confinement as a hostage in Iran between 2016 and 2018.Happy October 86th
As 105 hostages were slowly released during the pause in fighting over the end of November, a particularly unsettling phenomenon caught my eye as I perused social media: the crude denialism, even erasure, of Hamas’ atrocities toward their hostages in Gaza. It involved the active online participation of what could best be described as pro-Hamas publicity by sharing footage of Israeli hostages who appeared to be smiling, exchanging high-fives, waving and, at times, even expressing gratitude to their captors.
These images, the Hamas sympathizers insisted, were proof that the hostages had been treated decently and liked their Hamas guards. One user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote, “[Hostages] were having the time of their lives”; another one commented on how “they were treated well.” I find this very difficult to believe, especially since there have been instances where the hostages have taken the risk to attempt an escape from their captors – only to be tragically killed by the Israel Defense Forces by mistake. Furthermore, harrowing details shared by relatives of released hostages speak to beatings, hunger and lack of proper medical care.
As a former hostage of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran (IRGC), I was distraught to see the misleading viral narratives disseminated about the Israeli hostages on social media. Iran is the country that set the blueprint for rogue hostage-taking when Islamist students held more than 50 US Embassy staff hostage following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and unsurprisingly it is now funding Hamas.
It is true that hostage takers have good reason to keep their prisoners alive — they can extract a higher price for their release. While it is dangerous to idealize Hamas’ actions as humane, the fact that the hostages’ value lies in their well-being does mean their external conditions can appear relatively adequate. But even if there aren’t explicit signs of physical abuse, the psychological repercussions of terror and shock can take years for hostages to overcome. Leading psychiatrists have remarked on the necessity of extensive treatment for the trauma experienced by the hostages released from captivity in Gaza.
But it is wildly problematic to read any meaning into one orchestrated moment of release when hostages were still under Hamas control. In these politically precarious times, our social media landscapes have transformed into virtual war zones. It’s imperative to acknowledge that every hostage release serves as a carefully curated photo opportunity for Hamas, and for us to understand what the accurate experience of hostages in these circumstances is.
For the families of the hostages being held, for the families of the soldiers risking their lives day in and day out in Gaza, for the more than 1,400 families who have lost a loved one, for those cradling one of the many thousands of wounded in battle and for the country at large which experiencing the worst trauma in its history, it doesn’t matter that 2023 has made way for 2024.
Only in the hope that this calendar year doesn’t contain the heartache and grief of its predecessor (a very low bar, indeed), are we able to mark a differentiation between 2023 and 2024.
As long as our boys are dying in battle, our collective family is being held in inhumane conditions in Gaza, and Hamas is still clinging to a semblance of control, there is no room in our hearts – and no time in our lives – to celebrate.
The best we can do is raise a toast in the hope that October 86th will soon make way for a date in January or February to be determined. And that come next December 31st, Israel will have a blowout to match any New Year’s Eve celebration. And we won’t call it Sylvester.