A team of archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have been working to identify the victims of Hamas’s bloody October 7 attack, AFP has reported.
“We needed to go into the burned houses and start doing the archaeological work, which ordinarily is in a pastoral (setting), outdoors, we excavate antiquities, everyone smiling,” said Ajami, a career archaeologist and deputy director of the IAA.
In the weeks following the attack, paramedics, police and Zaka, an Israeli organisation specialising in collecting human remains, combed over the devastation in southern Israel’s towns, cities and kibbutzim.
However, the scope and scale of Hamas’s attack, in which Israeli officials say around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, has presented a challenge in identifying the bodies of the dead, many of whom were set alight, and locating those still missing.
“Someone in the army thought it was a good idea to invite the IAA, whose expertise is in finding partial human remains – skeletons, including those that are burned,” said Ajami.
Archaeologists were first called to Kfar Aza, a kibbutz bordering the Gaza Strip that was attacked by Hamas.