*** WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT *** ‘This Is the Gate of Hell’: Israeli Forensic Team Shows Media Bodies of Hundreds of Hamas Terror Victims

SHURA MILITARY BASE, Ramle, Israel — “This is the gate of hell.” That is how Gilat Bahat, an officer in the Israeli Police, describes the effort to identify the victims of the October 7 attack by the Palestinian terror group Hamas.

Israeli authorities brought the foreign press to this site to share the horror of what happened to innocent civilians — and to make sure there is never any doubt, never any attempt to deny it, or to excuse it.

Of the more than 1,200 people murdered, 784 bodies have been delivered to this site, in refrigerated trucks. The bodies are already bagged by first responders; the forensic investigators then have to open the bags to identify the victims.

They dread the moment.

Michal Levin Elad, a 25-year veteran of crime scene investigations for the Israeli police, told reporters: “We have seen children who were decapitated. We have seen children who were dismembered. It’s sights I have never seen before and hope to God I never see again.”

One particularly difficult moment, she said, was when they had to examine the body of one of their colleagues — a forensic investigator who had been at the Supernova music festival.

“I went to see him so that family and friends would know how he died,” she said. She was relieved: “He was one of the fortunate ones that was just shot.”

Other bodies, Bahat said, arrived in parts, having been dismembered. Some bodies were beheaded after being shot. The worst, he said, were the large groups of small bags — children, including infants between three and six months old, who had been shot and burned.

“This is the enemy we are dealing with.”

Dentist Dr. Ilana Engin, who volunteers as a forensic investigator, said, “The horrors of what I saw will be etched in my mind forever.”

Some remains were “heads without bodies that we needed to identify.” Some bodies “ended up being two people hugging together while being burnt.” And some bodies were little more than fragments of bone and ashes.

She spoke about the struggle to put her own emotions aside when she herself is a mother of a three-year-old.

Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News

Natah Katz, a commander in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in charge of forensic investigations, said: “I’ve been trying to shield my family and my friends from everything that has happened over the past two weeks. But the time has come for everybody to understand what happened.”

He spoke of whole families who had been torn to pieces when terrorists threw grenades into the bomb shelters where they had been hiding. He spoke of the eight Thai farmworkers whose hands had been bound behind their backs with Zip ties, who had been forced to kneel, and who were then executed with shots to the back of the head.

“These are things that I will never get out of my head. Nobody will.

“These are atrocities on a Holocaust scale.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel. The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.