‘I was falling apart’: Israeli describes horror of collecting corpses near Gaza
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An Israeli rescue worker sitting next to a dead body in Sderot, southern Israel.
PHOTO: REUTERS
SDEROT, Israel – Mr Yossi Landau has spent decades collecting corpses in Israel, but he almost reached his breaking point recovering the remains of people killed by Gaza militants in the country’s deadliest assault.
Mr Landau woke to the sounds of sirens on Saturday, a moment he had become “used to”, as Israelis took shelter from incoming rocket fire.
It was not until later that he realised the launches were “only a cover-up, because the main part (was) the invasion” by Hamas militants, who swept across the Gaza border to kill an estimated 1,200 people.
From his home in Ashdod, a coastal city north of Gaza, he recalled seeing “the horror” as he rushed to the scene.
“I saw cars turned over, I saw people on the street dead,” Mr Landau said in Sderot, a town near the border where multiple residents were killed.
He has 33 years of experience volunteering for Zaka, an organisation which recovers the bodies of people who suffered unnatural deaths.
But as gunfights raged between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces, Mr Landau said he witnessed violence he had never seen before.
A stretch of road that normally would have taken them 15 minutes to clear, said the 55-year-old, instead took them 11 hours to retrieve the bodies and put them in bags.
Abandoned cars which were torched or riddled with bullet holes still litter the landscape of southern Israel.
After already loading dozens of corpses onto refrigerated trucks, Mr Landau and fellow volunteers reached Beeri, a kibbutz of around 1,200 residents 5km from Gaza.
“I felt that I (was) falling apart – not only me, but my whole crew,” he recalled, after entering the first home and finding a dead woman.
Her abdomen, said Mr Landau, had been “ripped open”, and her unborn baby stabbed.
Blood-stained stretchers lying on a sidewalk in Sderot, Israel.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
The Zaka volunteer said he saw multiple civilians, including around 20 children, who had their hands tied behind their backs before being shot and torched.
“We saw some victims positioned (like) they (had been) sexually abused,” he added.
Stricken festival site
More than 100 people were killed in the kibbutz, while around 270 were left dead at the nearby Supernova music festival.
While the bodies of revellers had been removed from the site, their belongings were left strewn across the dusty grass.
When an AFP journalist visited on Thursday, beanbags, artworks and a bag of energy drinks were among possessions on the ground as soldiers walked by.
Blood splattered the inside of a car, not far from a sign detailing hiking routes through the forest.
An Israeli soldier patrolling near Kibbutz Beeri, the place where 270 revellers were killed by militants during the Supernova music festival.
PHOTO: AFP
Although Israel said it has retaken control of the border area, the army still reports firefights with holdout militants.
The military announced soldiers had “killed a terrorist” around a kibbutz a few kilometres away from the festival grounds on Thursday, soon after distant gunfire was heard from the site.
In response to the Hamas assault, Israel has so far hit Gaza with 6,000 bombs according to military figures.
The strikes have killed 1,417 Gazans, according to health officials in the Palestinian territory.
Confronted with the scale of violence, Mr Landau said he does not “feel anything right now”.
“We just take our feelings, and our jobs, and we separate them. And that’s what we have to do,” he said. AFP
