English News

by Aloni Elinel

I am here. At least, that is how it looks to the living. But inside, the clock has stopped. Part of me remains trapped among the steel containers, the smell, and the deafening silence of Beit Shura. Since that day, I have walked through this world as a shadow of the person I used to be, trying to return but unable to find the way back.

Now I am standing here by the hangar wall. I see them—the living. They walk around in white protective suits, like astronauts who have landed on a dead planet. I hear the hum of the refrigerated containers. I would recognize that sound among a thousand others: the low, monotonous rumble of Thermo King generators. They run without rest so the cold will keep the smell from escaping. But the smell is more cunning. It passes through metal, through mask filters, through skin.

Welcome to Machane Shura, the military rabbinate base. Before October 7, it was quiet here. Fallen soldiers were brought here—one or two a year. With respect. In silence.

Then the world turned upside down.

I remember the first day. Trucks. Not military Humvees, but ordinary freight trucks, supermarket refrigerated trucks, trucks used to transport chickens. They lined up. Liquid leaked from them, leaving dark, greasy puddles on the asphalt. We spread sand over the puddles so we would not slip. Slipping on what was once a person is terrifying.

There was nowhere near enough space. The containers were not placed on the parade ground; they would have been too visible there. They were stacked at the far end of the base, in a tight ring around the building where we carried out the examinations. An entire city of metal.

And after a week, the laws of physics caught up with us. The refrigerated containers held the temperature at four degrees Celsius above zero, not below. That was enough for food, but not for what had lain inside for weeks. The bodies began to thaw.

Then came a hell the newspapers do not describe. The liquid.

It was everywhere. Bodies we had not yet managed to examine lay on stretchers in the corridors, waiting their turn. Liquid dripped, streamed, and poured from the bags onto the floor. Heavy, oily puddles formed. You could not even walk to the bathroom without stepping in what had been a person. You walked down the corridor, and it squelched beneath your feet.

The sludge flowed out of the building, along the gutters, across the thresholds, and into the street. It soaked the ground around the hangar. Outside, the asphalt and soil were black and wet, as though there had been a downpour. But the sky was clear. It was not rain. It was them.

Sometimes it felt as though I was walking home knee-deep in that liquid. I had to throw my shoes away. The soles had absorbed death, and no amount of bleach could remove it.

You think hell is fire? No. Hell is white bags. Thousands of white bags piled in containers.

I am a forensic investigator. My work is facts: fingerprints, genetics, dental records. Before October 7, I believed science could explain everything, that death had an order to it. But there was no order here.

We were assigned to identify the dead. We were not ready. No one was. There were stainless-steel tables in the room. Cold. The light from the lamps was sterile and merciless.

These were not purpose-made body bags with zippers. The country did not have enough of those. They were simply enormous, thick white plastic bags, like garbage bags. Their openings were pulled tight with plastic ties.

There was no way to untie or unzip them. We simply cut them open. We slit the thick plastic with knives. The sound of a knife cutting through taut plastic became the sound of our nightmare.

Sometimes there was a person inside. Sometimes a part of one. Sometimes just charcoal—a small charred piece the size of a doll.

When we cut open those bags, we were confronted with more than the dead. Reality spilled out at us: decomposed organs, body parts, a mangled mass.

A person became biomass, refuse. You looked at that mass and caught yourself thinking a wild, paralyzing thought: “I’m made of this too. Inside me, there is only matter that will seep out in a week.” That awareness of your own helplessness before decay broke you more than the sight of death.

“Is this a child?” Yoni asked me on the first day. Yoni was a big man, a ZAKA volunteer and a bakery owner.

We had no CT scanner or X-ray machine to see inside that blackened lump. I leaned closer. When collecting bodies, ZAKA volunteers put everything they found nearby into the bag: earth, fragments, belongings. Among the ash and bones lay a melted, deformed object. I recognized it by what remained of its bright color. It was a toy car—or what was left of one.

“Yes,” I managed to say, feeling nausea rise in my throat. “Do you see the little car?”

We did not cry. You cannot cry there. Tears fog up your protective goggles, and if you take the goggles off, the smell burns your eyes. A heavy, sickly sweet smell, with a trace of iron and burnt rubber.

We worked shifts of twelve to fourteen hours. We could not leave the area. We rubbed Vicks thickly under our noses, until it stung. We chewed packs of mint gum until our jaws ached. But by lunchtime, a sandwich tasted like death.

You picked up food because you had to eat or you would collapse, and you tasted it in your mouth. You could not escape that hell. All food, every sense of taste, was caught in that smell.

The worst thing was not seeing a body. The worst thing was seeing a detail. A painted fingernail. A butterfly tattoo. A wedding ring on a finger lying apart from the hand. It knocked the air from your lungs. This was someone’s love, someone’s mother, someone’s daughter who had chosen a nail polish color only yesterday. And today I was trying to match her DNA so she could be buried.

There was nowhere to hide. We tried to protect ourselves by calling it “biological material.” But Israeli news played in the background.

They showed faces—alive, smiling. Parents cried on camera as they talked about their children. And suddenly the mass you had just examined became a person. You understood: this fragment belonged to that girl who loved to dance. You could not get away. During the day you saw the remains; in the evening you learned who they had been.

We worked as a team. It was a single process in which each person had a role: two opened the bag and sorted its contents, one took photographs, and an investigator wrote the report. ZAKA volunteers collecting the remains were always nearby.

As a forensic investigator, I was permitted to collect only material that was freely accessible. Often, that was not enough.

So pathologists worked beside us at the same table.

They were the ones who removed fingernails. If a body was badly burned, they made an incision down to the bone to retrieve surviving muscle.

And when a body had become one solid charred mass, with nowhere to take a sample, they picked up a saw. They sawed through bone right there, an arm’s length from me, to reach the marrow. The rasp of the saw and the smell of burnt bone dust. I watched and understood: this was the limit of my profession. This was what had been done to a human being.

I came home late at night. I took off my clothes in the building entrance, put them in a bag, and threw them into the bins. I showered in scalding water. I scrubbed my skin with a washcloth until it was striped red, until it bled. But the smell was not on my skin. It was inside my nose and throat.

My wife, Anat, tried to hug me. I pulled away. I felt contagious, as though death were a virus I could pass to her and the children. The bodies stood before my eyes. They were everywhere, even in my bedroom.

“What is it like there, Dani?” she asked quietly.

“We’re working,” I answered.

You ask when I broke? Not when I saw a baby without a head. The professional in me put up a barrier: “This is biological material. Work.”

I broke later.

A week passed, perhaps two. The hardest work was in full swing. We were working at our limit, trying to find anything that might help identify the dead, because all that remained of many people were charred fragments.

I came home to sleep for even three hours. I turned on the news.

I thought the world was grieving with us. I thought the world was horrified. But on the screen I saw London. Paris. New York. Crowds of people. Thousands.

They carried signs. The signs did not say, “Our condolences.” They said, “Stop the genocide,” “Free Palestine,” and “Resistance is justified.”

I looked at the clean, beautiful faces of the students, activists, and human-rights advocates. They shouted into megaphones. They smiled. And despite my gloves, the soot from a family in Kfar Aza was still ingrained beneath my fingernails.

At that moment, something inside me snapped.

There in Shura, we breathed death and walked through the fluids of the dead to prove that these people had lived. We gathered evidence of absolute, biblical evil. And the world said to us: “You are lying. And if you are not lying, you deserved it.”

People online wrote that we had burned our own children. That the rapes had not happened.

I wanted to grab those Harvard students by the collars and drag them to Shura. To Sector 4. I wanted to force them to look into the bag holding a woman whose hands had been bound with wire and whose legs had been spread, whose pelvis had been shattered by violence before she was shot in the face. I wanted to show them the bag holding a teenage girl whose genitals had been doused with acid. I wanted to ask them, “Is this resistance? Is this a fight for freedom?”

I watched the world that had sworn “Never again” suddenly say, “Well, it depends on the context.” It turned out Jews could be burned if you had the right slogan. It turned out that if the victim was Jewish, the victim was to blame—an “occupier” in their own home, in their own bed, at a music festival.

That broke me more than the sight of the bodies. The world’s betrayal. The loneliness. We were there, using tweezers to gather the pieces of our children, while the world called us murderers.

Post-traumatic stress does not arrive all at once. It creeps up on you.

First, sleep disappeared. I closed my eyes and saw flashes: faces, wounds, bags. I heard plastic rustling, the crackle of a bag being cut open. That sound became louder than my children’s voices. Then came the scraping sound.

Then came the smells. I went to a park with my family on Independence Day. Someone was grilling meat. The smell of roasting flesh made me vomit onto the grass. I fell to my knees, covered my head with my hands, and screamed, “Don’t! Don’t burn them!” People stared. Anat cried. I realized I was no longer here. I was still there, inside the container.

I went to a doctor. My health fund told me the wait was three months. I could not wait. I went to a private psychiatrist—an expensive one, in a clean, comfortable office.

He listened and said in his calm voice, “You need to work through this trauma.”

At that moment, I wanted to laugh like a madman.

Work through it? How do you “work through” seeing a family bound together with wire and burned alive? How do you work through knowing that a person becomes refuse, a mangled mass, and that the world approves of the beast who did it? This is not “trauma,” doctor. This is knowledge. No pills will erase it.

I stopped sleeping. I looked at my children and saw them dead. I stroked my daughter’s head and felt a shattered skull beneath my fingers. I had become a danger to them.

That day I opened the news again. Women at the UN said there was no evidence of sexual violence. No evidence. I remembered the body of the young woman numbered 3042. Her torn underwear. Her open eyes, frozen in a silent scream of a terror no film could portray. “No evidence.”

Something clicked inside me, like a light bulb burning out.

I realized I could not live in a world where evil was called good. Where murderers were applauded in public squares, while victims were accused of genocide because they had dared to survive and fight back.

I wrote a note. A short one.

“I love you. But I cannot turn off this smell. Forgive me for being weak. The world has gone mad, and I am getting off at this stop.”

But I did not send it. I did not pull the trigger. That would have been too easy.

Instead, I simply… stopped.

Now I am here. A shadow in Beit Shura.

I see my colleagues. Their hands shake as mine did. I see reservists returning from Gaza. Their eyes are empty, with a thousand-yard stare. They have seen what I saw. They have seen the tunnels where our children were held. They have seen homes filled with weapons and Mein Kampf in children’s rooms.

Then they return home, open the internet, and read that they are war criminals. That they are committing genocide.

You, there in Europe and America. You who wear keffiyehs instead of scarves. Do you understand what you have done?

You did more than support terror. You destroyed the faith in humanity of those who cleared away that hell with their own hands.

You killed me. It was not a bullet or a rocket. Your indifference and hypocrisy killed me. Your “Yes, but…”

Listen to me. The person I was is gone. I have nothing to lose.

Evil does not stop at borders. What we saw in Shura—the sludge into which people had been turned—is what they want to do to you. To every “infidel.” To everyone who lives freely.

We are the shield. We took the blow. We are dying from bullets and from grief, because our hearts cannot bear this pain.

And you stand in the squares and spit at our backs.

Look in the mirror. Who do you see? Because from here, from the darkness of Beit Shura, I can see your darkness closing in on you. And when it comes for you—and it will—there will be no one left to protect you. We were spent in the corridors of Beit Shura, trying to prove to you that we, too, are human.

Silence. Only the hum of the refrigerated containers. And the smell. The smell of the truth you refused to learn.

Aloni Elinel

P.S. Despite how unbearably difficult it was, I had to write this story, because the truth obtained at such a cost must not remain in silence.