‘The our bodies at Nova Festival had been nonetheless smouldering 12 hours later’

The sight and scent of the 30 charred our bodies that also smouldered as Haim Otmezgin pulled as much as the positioning of the Nova Festival on October 7 won’t ever depart him.

But Haim, a 50-year-old prime official of ZAKA, a rescue and restoration organisation that was tasked with cleansing up the 1,200 killed by Hamas on Black Saturday in accordance with Jewish customs, had a job to do.

As the commander of the particular models at ZAKA, he was in command of coordinating the response to the lethal assaults, and guaranteeing that each one the our bodies had been accounted for and handled correctly as quickly as potential.

But the brutality with which Hamas had killed greater than 360 harmless partygoers on the Nova Festival shocked even him, a volunteer who had been working for ZAKA since he was simply 18 years outdated.

Haim, who spoke to MailOnline by means of a translator, stated: ‘There were at least 30 bodies that were burned alive.

‘Many needed to have water poured on them because they were still burning 12 hours after because of the fuel they used to set them on fire.

‘Their bodies were soaking with this fuel that [caused them to burn for a long time].’

Hamas didn’t simply use fireplace as a weapon of battle towards partygoers on the pageant. Sexual violence was used to humiliate the victims on the web site, a lot of whom had been younger ladies.

He stated: ‘When I’m going again to the recollections, I bear in mind a lot of our bodies had been mutilated to items.

‘Organs were separated from their bodies, women had been shot in their very private areas, the upper parts of their legs, their heads.

‘Women were undressed and then they were shot.

‘A few bodies that were hit by rocks in a very barbaric way, in a way that crushed the skull.

‘I saw [stab wounds] in very specific areas on women, around their genitals.’

Haim, who grew to become conscious of reviews of a Hamas assault early that morning arrived on the web site of the Nova bloodbath at 9:30pm, says his function as a pacesetter at ZAKA meant he needed to forestall these photos from affecting him. 

He says he needed to ‘become a machine’, and was pressured to make some extremely troublesome selections on his approach down from his base in Petah Tikva to Kibbutz Re’im.

‘On the way from Petah Tikva to the south, I saw a few civilians waving at my ambulance.

‘I started thinking “I know I need to get south, but maybe in order to prepare for this, I should let myself into this situation slowly and see what these people wanna say.”

‘I thought that they probably want to tell me something in regard to what’s happening within the south.’

So he slowed down, and let the civilians, who had a automobile, strategy him.

‘They said: “We have two of them”.

‘I asked them: ‘“What two? What are you talking about?”

‘And they just showed me two dead bodies, young women, both shot in their heads.’

He had no selection however to take their our bodies, and proceed right down to the positioning of the pageant.

More and extra civilians tried flagging him down as he made his approach down with the ladies’s our bodies in tow, each holding a special individual slaughtered by Hamas fighters, who had been nonetheless rampaging all through southern Israel.

Haim stated he needed to make the very troublesome resolution to maintain going, despite the horrors he noticed.

‘I understood that I couldn’t simply cease and take each individual on the way in which, so I carried on.

‘We needed at least 15 ambulances and a few trucks in order to take all the dead bodies that were found on the way to the festival,’ he added.

This was, as Haim put it, when he ‘made the transition from being a human being to a machine.

‘I basically [was] just seeing these images, and just translated it into data.’

Haim stated that he didn’t count on his day would prove like this, when he was awoken at 6:42am that morning, subsequent to his sleeping spouse.

He was known as, and advised to right away report back to his base, not figuring out how necessary his job was to develop into.

The ZAKA officer was so in the dead of night that wasn’t certain whether or not to wake his kids up, not figuring out how lengthy he could be away for.

But he knew sufficient to know that October 7 could be essentially the most consequential in Israel’s trendy historical past.

This was cemented at 7:30pm, at his base in Petah Tikvah. There, whereas making ready for a menace with a then-unknown magnitude, he obtained a name from the Nova Festival.

A terrified IDF officer requested him: ‘How long does it take for a body to rot?’

Taken aback, Haim advised the officer he wanted extra particulars. The ZAKA officer stated he was advised:’I’ve a carpet of lifeless our bodies in the midst of the forest, I do not know what to do with them.

‘Nobody explained to me what to do with them. I don’t have any way of treating them. I don’t have the gear, the volunteers to take care of this. Maybe you’ll be able to assist me with this.’

Haim, nonetheless not sure what the officer imply, stated he requested to talk on a video name. It was then, watching a blurred and jumpy video streamed from a smartphone, that Haim understood the dimensions of the atrocity.

He stated the officer advised him that he had counted no less than 125 our bodies, however that there have been many extra that wanted to be counted.

In the 4 hours after he arrived on the web site of the Nova bloodbath, his workforce needed to clear as many our bodies, in step with Jewish customs, as potential. He stated ZAKA was capable of clear 237 our bodies in simply 4 hours, whereas nonetheless below fireplace from Hamas’ rockets and weapons.

But with dozens extra our bodies on the Nova Festival web site alone, and a whole lot extra throughout Israel, Haim stated his bodily well being took a toll as he carried his work on.

‘I didn’t cease working for 60 days. I used to be solely getting 4 hours of sleep an evening, and I misplaced 9 kilos in two months as a result of I didn’t have time to eat.’

It wasn’t solely his bodily well being that suffered.

Haim stated he refused to consider what he was seeing on October 7, as a substitute specializing in the principle job at hand as he labored.

He stated it was solely ‘months after’ the assault, when he spoke to his colleagues, that he started to course of the horrors he bore witness to.

‘I didn’t wish to give it some thought, however I felt that I wanted to talk out after listening to that this stuff had been being ignored and denied.’

‘For the first two weeks after October 7, many people were chasing after me in order to give my testimony. The police, international media, big networks around the world were asking to hear the story.

‘But I was escaping. I didn’t want to do it, and I still had this excuse of having many things to do, still operating everything.

‘It wasn’t a lie; We had been nonetheless working on quite a lot of the highways. I spent greater than 60 days on responsibility.

‘But I had the privilege of escaping. I didn’t placed on any information channels, or social media. I used to be utterly disconnected, specializing in the mission.’

‘Maybe it was easier to do this, more convenient.’

‘You can never be a total machine in front of these scenes and images of what we saw. But what we witnessed over there was bigger than any physical or mental difficulty.’

His 13-year-old son stored begging him for particulars, pushed by morbid curiosity and worry for his father.

He stated he would all the time push the requests again, claiming that there was little sign within the south of Israel, and conveniently forgetting to inform his son about what he noticed each time he went again.

But Haim couldn’t inform his household in regards to the horrors of what he noticed, as they didn’t should be weighed down with even a fraction of the horrors he witnessed on the web site of the pageant.

‘There’s a stability between being supported by my household, and conserving them away from the sights as knowledgeable. You can inform a part of the story, however not all of it.’

Haim stated he not often advised folks about what he did at work even earlier than Black Saturday.

‘Whenever I come back from any operation that ZAKA conducts, people ask me “what happened, what’s happening, inform us about it.”

‘Usually I inform them: “Read about it in the papers, I don’t want to talk about it.”’

He stated that Black Saturday was a wakeup name for Israel: ‘It reveals the reality of how naive we were about the values of war.

‘This war was about humiliating us. It was about deep hate, it was about defiling [us].’