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In the first and critical days of the war, the IDF decided to forego the deployment of hundreds of soldiers specifically trained in the identification and collection of human remains in mass casualty incidents. Instead, the Home Front Command chose to use Zaka, a private organization, alongside soldiers in the Military Rabbinate’s search unit

“We saw a woman, around 30 years old, [and] she was lying on the floor in a large puddle of blood, facing the ground,” said a Zaka volunteer tearfully in an account posted on Zaka’s social media accounts. "We turned her over in order to place her into the bag “She was pregnant,” he added and stopped to take a breath. “Her stomach was swollen, and the baby was still attached by the umbilical cord when it was stabbed, and she was shot in the back of the head. I don’t know if she suffered and saw her baby murdered or not.”

This horrific incident, which the Zaka volunteer alleged occurred in Be’eri, simply didn’t happen, and was one of several stories that have been circulated without any basis. There is no evidence for this incident, and no one in the kibbutz has heard of this woman. A Zaka senior official admitted in a conversation with Haaretz that the organization knows the incident didn’t occur.

The organization has been accused of spreading false information before. In December 2022, Haaretz reported that Zaka had inflated its stated number of volunteers for years in order to receive more funding.

Archive link to full article

  • Linkerbaan@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    204·
    9 months ago

    TLDR:

    • IDF blocked their own trained soldiers specialized in this exact use-case from investigating and retrieving the bodies on october 7. The soldiers were not provided with a reason

    • The IDF let organisations such as Zaka handle the bodies

    • Zaka made up multiple lies; such as Hamas cutting open the belly of a pregnant woman, putting babies in ovens etc.

    • Zaka transferred multiple bodies that were already in a bag to a different bag with a Zaka logo, for advertising.

    • Zaka did a very poor job at preserving forensic evidence

    Some additional lines from the article:

    More personnel were necessary, but when the soldiers of the Military Rabbinate’s search unit in the north and the Home Front Command’s unit for collecting fallen soldiers reported for reserve duty on October 7, they were told they had to wait. “I have no explanation for why they didn’t deploy [the Home Front Command’s unit] and our people from the north,” says an officer in Rabbinate’s southern search unit.

    In another video, which features the same volunteer, he describes, weeping, how he found the burnt and mutilated bodies of 20 children in one of the kibbutzim. He told Haaretz that this was behind the dining hall in Kfar Azza, while in another instance, he said it was in Be’eri. However, the children who were killed in Kfar Azza are Yiftach Kutz, 14, and his brother, Yonatan, 16. Ten children were killed in Be’eri, but at least some were known to have been with a parent and were killed in their homes.