Moshe Ajami is no stranger to human remains, but until last month, the bits of bone and teeth he handled were centuries, if not millennia, old.
Now, he and a team of archeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have turned their skills to finding and identifying the victims of Hamas’ bloody Oct. 7 attack.
Despite using the same techniques, this is grim work compared with their usual digs.
Photo: AFP
“We needed to go into the burned houses and start doing the archaeological work, which ordinarily is in a pastoral [setting], outdoors, we excavate antiquities, everyone smiling,” said Ajami, a career archeologist and deputy director of the IAA.
In the weeks following the attack, paramedics, police and Zaka, an Israeli organization specializing in collecting human remains, combed over the devastation in southern Israel’s towns, cities and kibbutzim.
However, the scope and scale of Hamas’ attack — in which Israeli officials said about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed — has presented a challenge in identifying the bodies of the dead, many of whom were set alight, and locating those still missing.
Photo: Reuters
“Someone in the army thought it was a good idea to invite the IAA, whose expertise is in finding partial human remains — skeletons, including those that are burned,” Ajami said.
Archeologists were first called to Kfar Aza, a kibbutz bordering the Gaza Strip that was attacked by Hamas.
Sifting through soil and ash, they apply decades of experience in “how to identify the smallest fragment of bone in an archeological excavation” to locate the remains of people killed in the Hamas attacks, Ajami said.
More than a month on, approximately 20 people are still listed as missing — neither confirmed dead, nor among the approximately 240 hostages taken by Hamas in Gaza, Israeli officials said.
Forensic archeology rarely deals “with an ongoing, contemporary disaster,” Ajami said. “It’s a different mission to try and find skeletons of missing persons in that hell, while 24/7 there are explosions and shelling all around us, and you need to do the mission. But we didn’t stop for a moment.”
On Thursday, archeologists and forensics teams scoured burnt-out homes in Nir Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel where a quarter of its 400 residents were killed, wounded, or taken hostage to Gaza. The grim work’s methodology bears passing similarity to an archeological dig.
“We divide the house into several locations and start digging,” said Ari Levy, an IAA archeologist working at Nir Oz.
Incinerated cars and the rooms of torched homes are broken down into grids, with the debris sifted for bone fragments and teeth. Any find sites are then meticulously documented.
“All these actions increase our possibility of identifying the remains and the findings we are looking for,” Levy said.
Families are asked about metal implants and prosthetics or jewelery that might help identify remains. The emotional toll is heavy.
“We know who we’re looking for, we know their faces in many cases, the names, the families, and the feeling here is ... difficult, because we can’t detach emotionally,” Levy said.
Ajami said teeth are especially important “because you can extract DNA from them even when the skeleton is burned.”
Of the roughly 60 people whose remains he and his team have found, at least 10 have been identified and laid to rest, Ajami said.
“I never believed I would have to do something like this, and I don’t think anyone in the world thought that something like this would happen,” Ajami said, adding that after 30 years of field archeology “all of that knowledge that I’ve accumulated is all funneled into this mission.”
“If we hadn’t come and lent a hand there, they never would have found these people. It’s a big privilege for me,” he said.
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS