Israel-Hamas war: Mutilated, charred remains bear witness to the extreme barbarity of militant attack
Day after day, the victims of the Hamas terror attacks arrive at the National Center of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv.
For the scientists trying to identify them, it’s heavy work and it’s getting a lot harder.
Warning: This report contains images of human remains and graphic descriptions of injuries – which some people might find distressing
It’s not full corpses they are receiving anymore, but charred fragments of bones.
Many of those killed were mutilated, their bodies burned and it is harrowing work for the team to try and identify them.
Chen Kugel, the director of the centre, greets us with warmth and a smile.
It is amazing he’s able to muster one.
He hasn’t stopped for weeks.
But when he finally does, he breaks down, distressed at the growing realisation that there are some individuals they just won’t be able to identify.
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Trying to identify the remains is harrowing work
“Professionally I want to bring every one of them to the grave to give them the last honour,” he tells me, as his eyes fill with tears.
He, like everyone here, feels a huge sense of duty to the families to provide them with news and hopefully, some closure.
Mr Kugel has witnessed a pattern of brutality that haunts him and it’s on a massive scale.
As we sit in his office, he starts to show us a series of images that highlight the extreme barbarity of the attack on 7 October by Hamas, which triggered the latest conflict.
“So many bodies were shot. But before they were shot, they were cuffed for execution style.”
Chen Kugel has witnessed a pattern of brutality that haunts him
Some have stab wounds, others have their hands tied with electric cables.
There is a child beheaded.
He shows us one image of a victim with stab wounds on his back and head.
“You can see that the pelvis is shattered. These are bullets inside. So he was shot, he was stabbed, he was burned. And then he was run over by a car.”
It is stomach-turning.
I too feel my eyes fill with tears as I look at the horrendous nature of some of the injuries.
Many of those killed were mutilated, their bodies burned
Many of the bodies were burned.
“It’s like a crematorium,” he says.
It’s bleached the bones.
Downstairs, Dr Nurit Bublil is looking at some of the toughest cases.
She’s in charge of the DNA lab where they’re looking at tiny bits of tissue.
Dr Nurit Bublil says Hamas ‘slaughtered our people and they enjoyed every minute of it’
But it’s a large item of evidence that stops her in her tracks – and me.
She lifts a bag and shows me a baby’s mattress. It’s covered in blood.
“This baby was probably stabbed in his own bed.”
You can hear rage in Dr Bublil’s tone as she describes the attackers.
“This is just genocide. For hours, they slaughtered our people and they enjoyed every minute of it.”
The team is anxious families get the chance to give their loved ones a proper burial
On the ground floor, we meet Michal Peer, an anthropologist.
She shows us boxes she says are filled with debris, metal, glass and even pieces of mobile phones that people were holding onto at the time.
Her job she says is to separate out the bones from the non-bones and try to trace who they might belong to.
She’s only 30-years-old.
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Michal Peer says dealing with the remains of children is ‘really difficult’
“Before this event, I had never had to deal with the remains of children,” she says.
“This is the first time and it’s really difficult.
“It’s hard to disconnect from it, but you have to because even if it’s the smallest piece of bone that we can send up to the lab for them to try to pull a DNA profile, that’s the whole reason I got into this field, for the families who are looking for their loved ones and wanting to know what happened to them.
“I want to let those families have the chance to give their loved ones a proper burial.”
It is slow, detailed, technical work and it is vital, for the families and the nation.
World
Ex-CIA director John Brennan calls Donald Trump’s plan in Ukraine ‘naive’ and ‘unsophisticated’
It is nearly 150 days since Donald Trump took office for the second time, promising peace in the Middle East and Ukraine.
For the latter, the war grinds on, with reports last week that Russia passed the grim milestone of one million deaths.
Ukraine continues to be bombarded, with Russia launching its biggest drone attack against the country since the start of the war. Most likely in retaliation for Ukraine’s audacious Operation ‘Spider’s Web’ at the beginning of the month, which saw remote-controlled drones launched deep into Russia, blowing up billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment.
Russia saw this as a significant escalation, as Moscow’s ambassador to the UK told me in a sit-down interview last week.
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Peace feels a long way off right now.
But does President Trump have a plan?
Ex-CIA director John Brennan does not think so.
On this week’s The World podcast, he called Trump’s understanding of both Ukraine and Vladimir Putin “naive” and “unsophisticated”.
I asked him what he thinks the president may do and, in no uncertain terms, he told me: “I think that Donald Trump doesn’t know what he will do.”
Ex-CIA director John Brennan thinks Trump doesn’t know what he will do in Ukraine. File pic: AP
It is no secret that the former director holds a low estimation of the president. For what it’s worth, the feeling is mutual.
In January, Trump revoked the director’s security clearance, and during his first term called him the “worst” CIA chief in history.
But, Brennan knows Ukraine.
Some reports say that it was during his time as director that the CIA began training Ukrainian spies.
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Russia’s ambassador to UK blames Britain for drone strikes
When he first visited the country in 2014, he recounts how the forces “were still riddled with a lot of the Russian services”, but a decade later, what is his assessment of the country’s military?
“Pound for pound, [it] punches above the weight of virtually every other military on the globe, I would say including the United States, given the tremendous experience that they’ve gained on the battlefield”.
So, does the director really believe Ukraine’s allies had no prior warning of Ukraine’s drone attack?
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
A career spook, he trod carefully around the questions, but admitted: “I don’t doubt for a moment that they were given some additional assistance from Western intelligence and military authorities and capabilities.
“The Ukrainians have done a lot on their own, but I think a lot of this is initially enabled by some ideas that come from their Western allies.”
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As the battlefields of Ukraine dry out to face another summer of war, this conflict continues to prove it is the “laboratory of the future”, as my co-host Richard Engel described it. The drone war intensifies, as does the battle of words between the two countries.
As a war of attrition continues in Ukraine, will Donald Trump, now preoccupied with protests in Los Angeles and unleashing thousands more troops on demonstrators, walk away from Ukraine and abandon it?
In the absence of detail, all we can do is read between the lines of what may or may not have been agreed in the London talks between the US and China.
And a degree of scepticism feels appropriate.
The fact neither side is saying much says a lot in itself. A major new breakthrough seems unlikely.
You only need to compare it to the conduct of the delegations following the first round of talks in Geneva to feel the difference in tone. Those talks did indeed yield significant breakthroughs including temporary reductions to most of the tariffs and an agreement to keep talking.
There, the Americans in particular were quick to get in front of the cameras to describe the “substantial progress” with Trump himself extolling “a total reset” in the relationship.
Not so this time.
Instead we have relatively dry statements from both sides about a “framework to implement the consensus” reached at both Geneva and during a phone call between Trump and Xi last week.
Any further description was tepid at best, with China’s official news agency describing the discussions as “candid” a word often used when there has been substantial disagreement.
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High stakes
It’s hard to overstate how high the stakes have become.
What started as a trade war has morphed into a dangerous supply chain war with the potential to wreak deep economic harm.
And by most assessments, it is China that has the upper hand.
Indeed, while the US has introduced a spate of new measures designed to block China’s access to high-tech chips, China has moved to slow and complicate the exports of crucial rare earth minerals to the US.
These metals are absolutely vital in the manufacture of everything from cars to weaponry, and China has the vast majority of the world’s supply.
The new controls have brought some production lines to the brink of standstill, and the West is alarmed.
On the ground here in China you get a sense that while this standoff will cause pain, there is confidence too, particularly in its ability to home grow the type of technology the US is attempting to block.
Indeed, as these talks were ongoing, a branch of the Chinese government was showing foreign journalists around usually hard-to-access high-tech businesses.
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April: US ends zero duty on Chinese goods
A confident China
A controlled and choreographed affair, yes, but an insight too into where government attention and priorities lie and where they are feeling confident.
“We’ve caught up with America in terms of technology and quality,” said Zhou Zhiliang, CEO of GeneMind, a high-tech DNA sequencing and diagnostics company.
“We just need to catch up in terms of the market, building trust in Chinese products and the scale of utilisation.”
Others, when we asked about restrictions imposed by the US, seemed relatively unfazed.
“The trade friction between China and US will have an impact on many industries,” said Zhang Jinhua, founder of IASO Biotechnology, a company specialising in high-tech cell therapies.
“But this is what running a business is like, you always have to face challenges and situations you never expected before, you have to face them.”
And while some moments of candour reveal the frustrations faced by Chinese businesses, the attitude seems to be that none are insurmountable.
“We were selling our products via Amazon, although we now face some problems,” said Yu Kai, co-founder of conversational AI product AISpeech.
“But I believe it can be solved. The current technology dispute doesn’t affect us very much, because we rely on ourselves.”
Indeed, that is the key problem for the US.
China can increasingly rely on itself and is making rapid progress in the development of its own chips and AI technology.
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In contrast, the US is totally beholden to China on rare earths; the development of its own supply would be lengthy and extortionately expensive.
With this upper hand, China will have been driving an exceedingly hard bargain in London.
In an atmosphere of extreme distrust, where neither side will want to be seen to concede, reaching a sustainable truce will be very hard indeed.
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