Medics weep as they tell how Israel massacre victims appeared to be hugging a loved-one when they died
DISTRAUGHT medics wept yesterday as they told how hundreds of the 1,400 Israel massacre victims appeared to be hugging a loved-one when they died.
Teary-eyed Dr Chen Kugel said a CT scan showed one set of charred remains to be two people at Tel Aviv’s National Centre of Forensic Medicine.
Dr Kugel, a forensic pathologist for 31 years, said: “From the shapes of their spines you can tell that it is an adult and a child.
“They are hugging tightly together in their final moments.
“They were burnt to death like this.
“Cremated alive in their own home.
“It is heart-wrenching and difficult to see, even for people like me.”
Pointing to bone fragments laid out on a hospital trolley, he added: “There are several people in it.
“Parts of a skull.
“It’s like a crematorium.
“This is all that remains of them.
“Their bodies are gone.
“This is a guy shot from behind.
“Wrist marks show he was handcuffed behind his back — and then executed.
“I am afraid that there will be some people we will never identify.
“You can’t take fingerprints from a charred body.”
Dr Kugel said soot traces in the throat of many victims showed they were burned alive.
The dead also included decapitated babies but he could not say how their heads had been removed.
He said: “I see charred babies.
“We see people without heads but I can’t say they are beheaded.
“I don’t know what is the reason there is no head, I can’t say it is a knife or maybe a projectile.”
Lab director Dr Nurit Bublil wept as she was overwhelmed at seeing a bloodied cot mattress being analysed at the centre.
She said: “You can see the size of this blood stain which means this baby was bleeding on top of this bed.
“We are working and crying but we will carry on.
“This is our country and our families and we will win.”
Meanwhile, horrifying footage taken from a slain terrorist’s head-cam shows Hamas tossing a grenade into a border post then executing the injured young female Israeli soldiers within.
One wails before she is silenced by a bullet.
It was posted on Israeli Telegram channel South First Responder because, it said, “the world must know about the brutality of the terrorists”.
Mum Renana Gome told how she was on the phone to her sons, aged 12 and 16, when Hamas kidnapped them.
She said: “I hear on the phone people speaking Arabic, thumping on the door.
“They snatched my two boys out of their bedroom and dragged them into Gaza.
“The last I heard was my 12-year-old son saying, ‘I’m too young, don’t take me’. And they took them. I don’t know if they’re together . . . if they’re alive.”