Sunflowers Will Bloom Again

"They murdered my son. They took my family to Gaza. Release them. I'm [nearly] 88 yeas old. Enough!"

"My son organized a good home for me, in a charming place. The kibbutz was so beautiful with flowers and views."

"I hadn't seen anything yet. I didn't understand what was going on [when Hamas terrorists entered the kibbutz on October 7]."

"Everything around was damaged and destroyed [she observed following her eventual rescue by security forces]."

"Everything came back to me. The whole trauma of my childhood] was reopened."

"It was exactly a Shoah [Holocaust] because only in a Shoah are babies brutally murdered out of pleasure, women, pregnant women, killed or raped, homes burned."

"I can't stop crying."

"We were so happy that we had a country and that we had a state. This is a second Holocaust for me."

Ruth Haran, 87, Kibbutz Be'eri, southern Israel

Covered bodies of Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on kibbutz Be’eri near the border with Gaza. Photo by MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images

 

In the October 7 terrorist assault by Hamas operatives on Israeli communities in southern Israel, Ruth Haran's son and two others of her family members were killed. Other family members, seven in total, including her daughter, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, aged three and eight, were taken hostage back to Gaza in the Hamas infiltration. On that Saturday morning, Ruth was alone in her home the kibbutz she had moved to five years earlier to be closer to her son Avshalom, after the death of her husband.

Kibbutz Be'eri was one of over two dozen other locations in the area that had been overrun by a surprise invasion of terrorists on a death-dealing spree, true to the charter of Hamas which delineates its purpose of existence as jihad; the destruction of the State of Israel and its residents' annihilation. On that morning, after the sirens sounded warning of incoming rocket attacks, Ruth tried to reach her son's cellphone, but there was no response.

She tried her daughter-in-law, and had the same result, and none of her grandchildren responded. She opened her door to a knock and faced two Hamas operatives. Suddenly called away, they vanished and she shut the door. When she ventured outside her home in the afternoon, two security men instructed her to return indoors and to remain in her sealed room. She hid in her home for the remainder of the day, unaware of the murderous rampage being carried out outside.

Rescuers arrived as night fell. Her home had been spared, and she had survived a deadly assault that took the lives of ten percent of the 1,100 residents of the Kibbutz. She was brought to a field nearby the kibbutz where the survivors had been gathered. Neighbours there who survived the massacre spoke of death and atrocities, women raped and young children killed. She discovered that her 66 year-old son Avshalom was among the dead. When she had tried his cellphone again earlier in the day, it had been answered by someone in Gaza.

This was also when she discovered that her daughter and grandchildren had been taken to Gaza. They have not been heard from since that time. One of her granddaughters, forcibly taken to Gaza, had long been involved in an organization that brought ill Palestinians from Gaza for medical treatment at Israeli hospitals. She was herself familiar with Palestinian workers; for years labourers from Gaza worked on the kibbutz, eating in their dining hall, working in construction.

 

An Israeli soldier in a ransacked Kibbutz Be'eri home

 

The kibbutz remains a closed military zone; a tableau of shocking carnage. Ruth was temporarily relocated to a retirement centre in Beersheba. Born in Bucharest Romania in 1935, Ruth Haran was the  youngest of four children. Her Polish-born father, a doctor, was exiled from Romania since he was not a citizen. As violence against Jews mounted there, Ruth's mother took the children in search of her husband. Reunited eventually, her father had a position in a hospital in Odessa, but as the Nazis approached they were forced to flee.

Eventually they made their way by train and boat to Uzbekistan and remained there until war ended. Her father in 1945 was appointed to lead the medical team in Kishinev, and there he died, of typhus. "And now the same thing has happened to [my son] Avshalom on the kibbutz", she wept. In 1947 her family immigrated to Israel during the rule of Mandatory Palestine by the British. "I thought I was in heaven", she said of seeing the Baha'i Gardens in Haifa "it was so beautiful".

"I admire Israel. I am happy to be Israeli."

"I didn't witness the [Nazi] death camps, so it was worse for me now."

"As a child, we ran away and did not have a home. This time I will not run away again. I will return to my home."

"In the fall, the sunflowers will bloom in the kibbutz, and it will be even more beautiful than it was."

"I want to go back home."

 

Blood at the scene of the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri.

Cremated Beyond Identification

"It’s hell. I can’t imagine that people have to see the results of terrorists’ atrocities."

"Trucks full of bodies have arrived here. One was filled with just children. I can’t describe what we have seen – Jewish families burnt while embracing each other and having to be separated."

"People, babies, without heads. Soldiers with damage from bombs and bullets. It was like a butcher shop, victims in plastic bags but with horrible smells."

"On Monday, I was asked to volunteer to take families looking for the bodies of their loved ones in the morgue. I had no experience at this."

Social worker Adi Skandrion

LUCIEN LUNG/RIVA-PRESS FOR LE MONDE

 There is no opportunity to take a break, bodies keep arriving at the Abu Kabir morgue. These are not the types of cadavers that are usually delivered to the morgue. These are bodies that are rarely intact, bodies burnt beyond recognition, reflecting the scale and sadistic brutality of the attack on southern Israel by Hamas. There are some 200 bodies of the total of over 1,400 dead -- children, women, the elderly, soldiers that forensic pathologists have not yet been capable of identifying, given their state of mutilation or incineration.

Damage so utterly severe making the task beyond complex. So much so that the Israeli government has resorted to asking archaeologists to help in collecting bone fragments from the attack sites. Chen Kugel, director of the national forensic centre where the morgue is located, described the condition of many of the bodies brought to the morgue: "Like coal". There are new discoveries of human remains on a daily basis, almost a month after the attack.

Israeli soldiers are retrieving more bodies during military operations in Gaza. Search-and-rescue teams comb fields, homes and military barracks targeted in the October 7 attack whose scale and level of barbarity still stuns the minds of Israel's population and its government. Despite distinctive details sometimes revealed by autopsies, experts struggle to identify the dead; a man with a metal forearm plate, a woman with a mastectomy scar, still unnamed.

The issue of foreign workers for whom a DNA match is not yet possible for identification purposes. And the anomalous situations where the bodies forensic pathologists believed at first were those of Israelis, turning out to be Hamas operatives. The morgue which sits off a main Tel Aviv thoroughfare receives refrigerated truck deliveries; in one were six bodies; three white body bags and three black, each with its serial number printed on a pink tag to be wheeled on stretchers into the morgue.

Since the attack, Israeli authorities have been unable to accurately say how many people were murdered, how many abducted by Hamas, with fluctuating numbers almost daily, partially based on intelligence and on forensic reports. In the confusion, a third category of victims has been established; those who are missing. Some of the bodies may be at the Abu Kabir morgue or one of two other morgues outside Tel Aviv operated by the military and police.

Many of the victims so extensively and deeply incinerated making DNA extraction virtually impossible. Caused by Hamas terrorists setting fire to homes and barracks to kill anyone trapped inside. Entire families were murdered in other instances, making it difficult to find survivors to claim the dead. Relatives are asked to donate DNA, also asked to bring dental records, toothbrushes to assist with identification of the missing.

"I've never seen this many bodies essentially cremated in a single event". commented Tal Simmons, a forensic anthropologist from Virginia Commonwealth University who volunteered at the centre and has had experience working in war zones around the world. The communities devastated by Hamas are being combed by teams of search-and-rescue workers for traces of human remains. "There's so little left. Every piece of ash could help", explained Simcha Graiman, a worker with Zaka, a volunteer Israeli rescue organization.

There are other bodies being recovered by Israeli soldiers during Gaza operations. Some seem to have been dropped by Hamas while they fled back across the border fence into Gaza, while others appear to have fallen out of pickup trucks while being driven into Gaza.

 

Burial of a victim of the October 7, 2023, attacks at the Har HaMenuchot cemetery, also known as Givat Shaul, in Jerusalem, October 15, 2023. LUCIEN LUNG/RIVA-PRESS FOR LE MONDE