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A rescue worker in Israel reported unimaginable scenes at the scene after the massacre by Hamas terrorists. “We thought we were strong, we thought we had seen everything, but we were convinced,” said Avigdor Stern of the German news agency.
The 39-year-old is one of hundreds of volunteers from the Zaka rescue service who have been helping for days in the border area with the Gaza Strip to fully recover the dead and thus pay their last respects.
“We just cried”
He was in the synagogue when he heard about the worst massacre in Israeli history. Actually, he wanted to celebrate the Jewish holiday Simchat Torah (Joy of the Torah). “But we couldn’t dance, we just cried,” he says.
After the holidays, he and his colleagues drove to the villages in the border area and found miles of destruction. “At that moment our lives changed forever,” says Stern, who lived as a rabbi in Constance on Lake Constance for several years.
Body bags were no longer sufficient
“Such a mass of corpses, a corpse and another corpse and another corpse,” says Stern. There were so many that the body bags were not enough. They had to be requested from all over Israel. “There were trucks full of bodies,” Stern says, describing the scenes at the scene.
He and his colleagues had seen a lot: tsunami victims, earthquakes, accidents, attacks, but this dimension was one that no one had expected. “Women, men, children, babies, I can’t explain it at all,” says the Zaka helper, showing a photo with a small body bag. It has ‘Baby’ written on it.
In the Jewish faith, every body part must be buried, Stern explains. This is how people are paid their last respects. This is Zaka’s job. “We knew we couldn’t stop, we knew we had to do it now.”
Grenades thrown into crowded bunkers
A survivor of the Hamas Islamist massacre in Israel tells of the terrorists’ “cruel hunt” for visitors to a music festival. “First came the rockets. I stayed very calm and thought they would definitely be intercepted, but then the shots started,” said Noam Cohen. They just ran. Together with about twenty other young people, he turned it into a missile protection bunker. “We thought we were safe.”
But then the nightmare only began. The bunker has become a “death trap,” Cohen says. Several terrorists threw grenades into the packed bunker. “I saw people explode next to me, over and over again, body parts everywhere,” Cohen describes the scenes. He shows videos documenting the horror. “It became clear to us that the terrorists wanted us here, completely at our mercy.”
He was in the back and that saved him. “I could hide under the corpses; they became a human shield,” he says. After about 10 hours he was found and taken to hospital. Of the dozens of festival visitors, at most three or four made it out alive. “I don’t know how I survived.” (SDA)
Source: Blick
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
