‘The our bodies at Nova Festival have 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 location 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 accountable for coordinating the response to the lethal assaults, and making certain that each one the our bodies have been accounted for and handled correctly as quickly as doable.

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on the Nova Festival shocked even him, a volunteer who had been working for ZAKA since he was simply 18 years outdated.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 a translator, mentioned: ‘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 warfare towards partygoers on the competition. Sexual violence was used to humiliate the victims on the web site, a lot of whom have been younger ladies.

He mentioned: ‘When I am going again to the recollections, I keep in mind numerous our bodies have 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 turned conscious of reviews of a Hamas assault early that morning arrived on the web site of the Nova bloodbath at 9:30pm, says his position as a frontrunner at ZAKA meant he needed to forestall these photographs from affecting him. 

He says he needed to ‘become a machine’, and was compelled to make some extremely tough selections on his manner 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 automotive, 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 alternative however to take their our bodies, and proceed all the way down to the location of the competition.

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

Haim mentioned he needed to make the very tough determination to maintain going, regardless of the horrors he noticed.

‘I understood that I couldn’t simply cease and take each particular person on the best way, 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 mentioned that he didn’t anticipate 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 instructed to instantly report back to his base, not realizing how essential his job was to develop into.

The ZAKA officer was so at the hours of darkness that wasn’t positive whether or not to wake his kids up, not realizing how lengthy he could be away for.

But he knew sufficient to know that October 7 could be probably the most consequential in Israel’s fashionable 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 instructed the officer he wanted extra particulars. The ZAKA officer mentioned he was instructed:’I’ve a carpet of lifeless our bodies in the course 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 may assist me with this.’

Haim, nonetheless uncertain what the officer imply, mentioned 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 size of the atrocity.

He mentioned the officer instructed him that he had counted at the least 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 staff needed to clear as many our bodies, in keeping with Jewish customs, as doable. He mentioned 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 lots of extra throughout Israel, Haim mentioned 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 mentioned he refused to consider what he was seeing on October 7, as a substitute specializing in the principle activity at hand as he labored.

He mentioned 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 need to give it some thought, however I felt that I wanted to talk out after listening to that this stuff have 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 have been nonetheless working on plenty 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 saved begging him for particulars, pushed by morbid curiosity and concern for his father.

He mentioned he would at all times 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 every time he went again.

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

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

Haim mentioned he hardly ever instructed individuals 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 mentioned 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].’