“They are not animals or monsters, Hamas is diabolical”

A few hours after identifying the penultimate of the 251 kidnappedthe doctor Ricardo Nachaman He serves a group of Spanish journalists in offices near his Forensic Medicine Unit facilities in Tel Aviv.

If the accounts are correct, although he does not keep them, There are already 1,261 corpses whose identification he has directed in the only forensic laboratory in the country.

The sum brings together those massacred in the south of Israel that October 7, 2023 the 83 hostages who never returned alive. “In these just over two years since the attack, I have gone from working 170 hours a week to 570“.

Maybe this nightmare will end soon. This Wednesday, after confirm the identity of Dror Or “in just five and a half hours of work”there are only two more bodies left to “return home”, as we read on posters, graffiti, badges, newspapers, televisions, napkins, shopping bags… or on every corner of this small country.

His has been one of the hardest jobs in this time, along with a small team of only five forensic doctors for the entire country. His wife is deputy director of the DNA area, which has been an advantage in this (still) eternal nightmare.

“I have never seen anything like this. Hamas are not animals, nor are they monsters,” he elaborates with his eyes staring at the journalist. “Animals don’t do these things and monsters don’t exist.…no, Hamas are human, bringing out the darkest and most diabolical part of the human being.”

“Believe our conclusions”

Apart from the human trauma caused by the attack that every Jewish citizen feels, Nachman has had to refine your techniquegoing from two days per corpse to 12 hours per body.

And this Wednesday, “We couldn’t keep the family waiting any longer, after more than two years,” to the little more than five hours that it took him last morning to get the penultimate body.

But in these two years, he had to request special permissions to access images of that infamous day reserved for high-ranking officials in the country’s security.

“Sometimes, scientific evidence gave us unimaginable results“, he explains, “and we had to compare it with the infinite amount of audiovisual material that the terrorists recorded, in order to believe our own conclusions.”

Add that “savagery is the minimum word” what comes to mind. That “seeing what they did to each body is incredible.” And professionalism which allows you to understand how each of the victims died, “what damage they suffered, how long it took them to die”, has allowed him to “see” what everyone went through.

“And how they were cruel, with the living, until you kill themand the dead, desecrating their bodies without any respect“.

play soccer

That’s when he explains with aseptic forensic words what we will call mutilations: heads, genitals, or breasts of womenwith whom the terrorists came to play soccer.

But to all this, there is one more circumstance in Nachaman’s case: like almost everyone in Israel, he knew some victims.

“I have had to identify the my cousin’s sonand at father of my daughter’s friend“. Both were murdered at the Nova festival, where just over 10% of the 3,500 attendees were ambushed, shot and, some, gang raped and/or burned alive “with accelerants”.

In the savage attack organized by Hamas, together with Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups in Gaza, it is always said that about 1,200 Israelis were murdered. The reality is that there were 1,182 those tortured, raped and massacred.

And not all were Israelisnor Jews.

In fact, of the two hostage bodies that remain to be returned by the aggressors, one of them is Thai, Rinthalak Sudthisak, 43 years oldwho worked in the fields of a kibbutz attacked since 2017, and who was caught in the middle by the eternal hatred of the Islamists for the State of Israel.

The other is Ran Gvili, who was 24 years old and was originally from Meitar, in southern Israel. He was a member of the Yasam anti-terrorist unit of the southern district police and that day He was on sick leave, but upon hearing the news he put on his uniform and he went south to defend his fellow citizens.

Both died on the same 7-O. The same as the last identified, Dror Or, 48, who was murdered in Kibbutz Be’eri, where he lived, and His body was taken to Gaza as a “trophy”. His wife and two children were also captured, but they were released in the first partial agreement between Israel and Hamas, in November 2023.

From the tomography to the statement

The Prime Minister’s Office, Benjamin Netanyahuconfirmed this Wednesday in a statement that the body handed over by Hamas on Tuesday night, as part of the ceasefire agreement, was that of Or. Army representatives informed the family that their loved one had been returned to Israel.

Nachaman explains how he works under this moral pressure. The first thing is to assign a identification number that will accompany the body to the family. Then comes the determining factor: the computed tomography.

“There is a kind of ‘virtuopsia'”describes. “It’s not that we do a virtual autopsy, but rather that we do the diagnosis by imaging.”

Precision lies in details that cannot be faked, the paranasal sinusesFor example. Those small cavities in the forehead that each human being has uniquely. If there is a premortem x-ray and a tomography of the corpse, “the comparison generates a 100% scientific result”.

But the most revealing thing is how Nachaman also becomes war crimes investigator.

Bias or science

Even if you receive information about how a person died, your obligation is to confirm it scientifically. “We have had several cases in which Hamas said something and we reach all concrete evidence, 100%, that this was not the case“, he comments.

There is an emblematic case, of which he prefers not to give the names, although in Israel everyone identifies it, because everyone knows every story.

A mother and her children returned by terrorists claiming they died in an Israeli bombing. “Bodily damage from an explosion is not that of a shooting. Nor is that of a cremation the same as that of a decapitation,” he explains, fleeing from real data.

In this specific case, their analyzes revealed the truth. “I have not found anything that can corroborate what Hamas said. Quite the contrary. No bombardment, the bones are very good. They were killed by suffocation“, he ends by revealing.

Faced with the inevitable question about whether their reports, being state officialmay have a political bias, Nachaman responds with a tone of certain pride.

“This is a neutral Institute of Forensic Medicine. I gain nothing by saying something that is not. I greatly respect my name and my profession. I have even had to come out against my Government! I have gone to testify against Ministry doctors“.

Anthropologists and archaeologists

The terrorists documented their actions on video, proud of their training. “They used accelerants to literally make bodies disappear“.

In the same way that the human remains from the kibbutzim They had to be recovered with the help of archaeologists, each autopsy requires the help of anthropologists to catalog bone fragments. “As a single vertebra, in the case of a girl…they get to know the age, the race, the gender.”

Another particularly brutal identification was that of a cremated woman attached to a child of about 10 years old, both tied with wire. “Everything indicates that they tied them up while they were still alive and set them on fire,” explains Nachaman.

Although he could not definitively corroborate it:They did not find the tracheas to check if there was soot..

The Netanyahu Government reiterates that it works tirelessly to give a dignified burial to the two pending fallen hostages. In this first month and a half of ceasefire, Hamas has returned the bodies of 28 hostages in exchange for Palestinian bodies held by Israel.

But without completing the first, negotiations for the second phasewhich contemplates reconstruction and a transitional government without Hamas, are on hold.

Like Nachaman and his wife, who remain in Tel Aviv, waiting to finish the longest job.