Israeli Emergency Workers Describe Horrors They Saw at Worst-Hit Attack Sites

ZAKA teams confront the terrible legacy of terrorist brutality during massacre clean ups.

Israeli rescue workers remove dead bodies from near a destroyed police station that was the site of a battle following a mass-infiltration by Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, on Oct. 11, 2023. Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters

Israeli emergency workers who responded in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks on the Jewish state encountered some of the most horrific of first-hand views of the massacre.

At terror sites, workers and paramedics from Israel’s emergency response agency ZAKA, which operates in Israel and internationally, perform search-and-rescue tasks, handle bodies, body parts, and spilled blood following Jewish religious law. Many of its workers are Orthodox Jews.