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A Forensic Mission Following the Hamas Terrorist Attacks in Israel

— One physician's on-the-ground experience after the October 7 attack

MedpageToday
A photo of forensic experts at the National Center for Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, Israel.

"What is your first political memory?"

It was one of those questions undergraduates pose when they're both showing off and trying to get to know each other. Second year at college, sitting around the dining table, the other answers showed me how different my life had been from the lives of my peers. We had all come into this world between 1968 and 1970. They all remembered the Watergate hearings on television, adults hollering at the tube. One kid whose hippie parents didn't own a TV remembered a protest march.

I am Israeli, an immigrant to the United States. My first political memory is the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

I was only 4 years old, but I remember air-raid sirens, jets screaming, rushing downstairs with my mom to hide in the dank utility closet that served as a bunker. I remember being taken to visit my dad, a combat medic, as a patient in the hospital. Both his legs were strung up in traction, both femurs broken when he was caught in an artillery blast and blown off a cliff. Everyone had been so afraid he wouldn't come back when he'd left for the front. I remember my mother's grief and relief seeing him there in that hospital bed, legs like whitewashed logs, rehabilitation uncertain, a casualty of war -- but only to be counted among the wounded. Dr. Menachem Melinek was still alive.

When the atrocities of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel were reported in the news, I had spent most of my life as an American and was working at the other end of the world, in New Zealand. But all these core childhood memories returned -- including the fundamental fears and the feeling of vulnerability.

It's been 50 years since the Yom Kippur War and I am now a middle-age woman with adult kids of my own, but when I hear accounts of what the terrorists did, the terror comes right back. This is what happens to children of war. You don't forget fear, and I know of only two responses: flee as far away as possible, or run toward it to see how you can help, who you can save, what good you can do. This generation of Israeli and Palestinian children are learning about fight or flight on a personal and deeply rooted level that they will never be able to leave behind.

Like my father, I am a doctor. Unlike him, I have no training in battlefield medicine. But I have a different skill set that is in high demand after the October 7 attack: I am a forensic pathologist, a sub-speciality of doctors trained to identify the dead and document traumatic injuries on their bodies on behalf of government entities, for the next of kin, for legal action, and for posterity. I suspect that I may be the only forensic pathologist outside of Israel who is also fluent in Hebrew. Calls went out on social media that doctors were needed to treat the thousands of civilians injured in the attacks. Calls also went out, urgently, for forensic pathologists to aid in the task of identifying the nameless dead. I recognized that I had to find a way to volunteer.

The nonprofit made the arrangements. I landed in Israel in the wee hours on the Sunday a week after the attacks and met the other three forensic pathologists APF had enlisted from the U.S.: Drs. Carl Wigren, Julia de la Garza, and Ariel Goldschmidt. Julia had been a pathology resident when I was in my forensic fellowship training in New York City during and immediately after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. We had worked together in that mass-casualty homicide event, so we knew what to expect. Or we thought we knew what to expect.

As I write this, I have just spent a week working alongside the doctors and technicians at the Israeli Institute of Forensic Medicine -- the nation's central morgue -- identifying the civilian victims of the October 7 attacks. The trauma we're seeing is in many ways much worse than what we experienced on September 11. The pace of the work is similar: long shifts sifting through burned, mangled, decomposed human remains, looking for identifying features or property that we can document, our day punctuated by periods where we wait around for the next truckload of corpses and grab some time to eat.

What's different is this: we knew what had killed all the victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. We had all watched it unfold on television or with our own eyes -- I was in Manhattan, walking to work, and saw the first plane go over my head seconds before it struck the North Tower. But, here, today in Israel, we aren't just identifying the dead. We are trying to figure out how they died and documenting war crimes.

The opening of each new body bag reveals a fresh horror. A young man with wrist restraints, shot at close range in the head. An elderly woman with a rifle wound in her leg who bled out and died slowly. Teenagers with braces on their teeth and shrapnel injuries in their flesh. Some of the badly burned body parts might arrive in a bag commingled with others. We will then initiate paperwork on multiple separate cases, like after we opened the one bag with two incinerated torsos, a pelvis, and leg bones. None of the extremities were attached to either torso, so they might belong to either of them -- or to a third victim. Or a fourth, a fifth.

Meanwhile, some of the Israeli staff members find that they have to ask others to cover a shift because they need to go to another funeral, or have just found out a relative was identified, and they need to comfort next of kin in their own family. Unlike America after 9/11, nearly every person in this small country knows someone who died, is injured, or is missing and maybe a hostage. And unlike my experience working the 9/11 recovery, our work in Israel today is interrupted every few hours by air-raid sirens. We drop what we're doing and rush to shelter in the bunker. It's a reminder that the people who sent us these cruelly traumatized bodies are right outside, trying to finish the job.

Reporters were the other day to watch us work, to bear witness to the carnage. It's not something I am used to seeing in the American morgues where I've worked, all of which have different health privacy laws and policies, but I understand why the Israeli administrators would allow the press to come in. When so much of the world gets misinformation about unfolding events, it's important to correct the historical record with whatever evidence we can provide through our work.

We document mechanisms of death and collect evidence so that the innocent civilians who were murdered in their homes with their bodies burned beyond recognition can be returned to their families. So that the world knows what happened to them, the dead in our care, and so someone can, maybe, bear witness to hold the perpetrators of these homicides accountable. So that the world will know what happened and remember.

APF is currently seeking the help of volunteer physicians with expertise in orthopedics, neurosurgery, physical medicine, and rehabilitative care. (Anera) has been working to alleviate the suffering of civilians in the Gaza Strip, including through medical relief, and will continue their operations.

Judy Melinek, MD, is an American forensic pathologist and the CEO of PathologyExpert Inc. She is currently working as a contract pathologist in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the co-author with her husband, writer T.J. Mitchell, of the New York Times bestselling memoir , and two novels, First Cut and Aftershock, in the Jessie Teska forensic detective series. You can follow her on and .