Israeli first responders have opened up about the horrifying scenes they were confronted with in the immediate aftermath of the unprecedented Hamas terrorist attacks that resulted in the deaths of at least 1,400 people.
Among the horrors, they were confronted with victims who had clearly been shot in the back, civilians burned alive, children with their hands tied behind their backs, and, in one case, an unborn baby who had been ripped from its mother's stomach.
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The day of the attack, Oct. 7, started in a familiar way for the communities near the Gaza border — with air sirens going off, alerting them to rush to the nearest bomb shelter to ensure their safety. But these shelters, which had long protected Israelis from sporadic rocket and missile fire from Hamas or other Gaza-based terrorist groups, did not provide them the safety they needed.
"All of a sudden we start to get some information that the missiles [from Gaza were] basically a cover-up for an invasion, major invasion for settlements, for towns, for kibbutzim, for cities in Israel," Yossi Landau, one of the first responders, said during a Tuesday press conference.
Landau has worked with the Zaka organization, which operates as a rescue and recovery organization for civilians on the front lines, for more than three decades and has been a part of other recovery efforts including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S. When he got word of the attack, his family went into their shelter, while he left to help others in need.
"We had no place where to take the bodies in Sderot. So sorry to say, but I just broke into a truck that was parked over there, had no choice, and we filled up that truck with bodies. We've taken the bodies and put it in the bags and just putting it in the truck. That's to respect them. They shouldn't be in the street," he added. "I can say 70% of those victims were shot in the back, not in the front; they were all shot in the back, not once, not twice, or from the side."
Some civilians were burned alive in cars trying to flee, while others were "burned to death" in bomb shelters, Landau stated, also at one point describing a living room in which a mother, daughter, and two children were killed with their hands tied behind their backs, while their bodies had shown signs of torture.
"We see a woman, she was about 38, and she was lying on the floor in a puddle of blood, a big puddle of blood, face down. We have to turn her over in order to put it in the body bag. She was a pregnant woman, her stomach was butchered, though the baby there was connected to the cord, stabbed. And she was shot in the back," he added, choking up. "We have a debate between us if to use two body bags for the baby and for the mother. ... We decided we're going to use only one body bag because we don't want to disconnect this baby from the mother."
As Hamas and other groups fired rockets into southern Israel early that Shabbat morning, more than 1,500 terrorists were able to get through the border wall to conduct their attacks on the nearby civilian populations. Other terrorists were able to fly over the fence using paragliders. In the hours that followed, the terrorists killed, burned, and executed civilians and Israeli military personnel indiscriminately. The death toll from the terrorist attacks has now surpassed 1,400 and the number could still rise as Hamas and the other terrorist groups involved have roughly 200 hostages, if not more.
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The Zaka organization announced in the aftermath of the attacks that about 260 bodies had been recovered from an outdoor concert where terrorists landed via paragliders and opened fire in the crowds.
Israel’s National Center of Forensic Medicine is working to identify the remains of people whose bodies are unrecognizable. Dr. Hagar Mizrahi said on Monday that 504 victims had been positively identified while 297 bodies or bags of remains remain unidentified, according to the Times of Israel.
“The single mercy is that we are finding soot in victims’ tracheas, which means that they likely passed out from smoke inhalation and probably were not conscious as they were being burned alive in their safe rooms,” Chen Kugel, the head of the National Center for Forensic Medicine, said.