Israeli rabbis work around the clock to count dead from Hamas attack
SITRIYA, Israel — Rarely do rabbis spend the Sabbath counting bodies. But on Saturday, a week after Hamas militants blew easily past Israel’s fortified security fence and gunned down hundreds of Israelis — at music festivals, in their homes, in cars while trying to flee — Israel’s military rabbinate made an exception. 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. “Generally, Jewish law says that you cannot break the Sabbath for a dead person,” said Rabbi Israel Weiss, who is helping lead the operation. “The exception is when a family is in doubt, and the death is so crippling that it may risk the family’s lives. Then, you must work on the Sabbath to identify the body and bring answers to the family.” Now, the best the country can offer the families of some 1,300 people killed by Hamas militants is final confirmation that their loved ones are dead. 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. Seeking the final word on their loved ones, families across Israel have flocked to hospitals to give DNA samples in the hope that they can be matched to the bodies at one of several bases around the country receiving the dead. The family of Maayan Mualem wants answers. The last they heard, Maayan had been shot in the back by Hamas fighters who burst into the open field of the music festival she attended, gunning down partygoers in an open field. Her family spent a whole day searching Soroka Medical Center in southern Israel to find her body, only to come up short. “For 12 hours until midnight, we went department by department, bed by bed, and she wasn’t there,” said Raz Mualem, Maayan’s brother. Last week, the family filed into a police station outside of Tel Aviv to give DNA
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