After 7 October, forensic teams at Shura say they were never the same

Dr. Tomer Portnoy, a radiologist at Schneider Children's Medical Center, says 10 days of reserve duty at Shura changed him permanently. He was called up on the afternoon of 7 October 2023 and expected a different assignment, but instead was sent to help identify victims of the Hamas attack by opening body bags, documenting bullet entry and exit wounds, and searching for details that could aid identification. He said he was told the work was about “value” and “mission,” but described it as “a punch in the face.”

At Shura, Portnoy said there were four trucks waiting to be unloaded when he arrived, and that each workroom included a doctor, dentist, military photographer and a representative of the Military Rabbinate. He said the team worked at extreme speed, with a bag coming in and a bag going out about 12 times a day. Because the Military Rabbinate’s male team was not allowed to handle women’s bodies, Portnoy mostly examined bodies of soldiers and Nova music festival victims. He described seeing a young man in shorts and a blue shirt whose body had been mutilated, and other victims who had been shot, decapitated, burned in half, or otherwise desecrated.

Portnoy said the work produced an anxiety attack on his eighth day and left him unable to regulate his breathing or emotions even 2 years and 7 months later. He is still checking whether he is functioning as before 7 October. Yigal Foigel, 39, a senior imaging specialist at Kaplan Medical Center and deputy head of the imaging school at Clalit Health Services, came to Shura about a week after the attack and served 300 reserve days. He said he returned home “a ghost,” became more fragile and tearful, and changed in his parenting, marriage, patience and ability to enjoy life.

Foigel said Shura had one CT scanner at first, brought in a portable unit from Ben-Gurion University, later receiving a second machine, one for soldiers and one for civilians. He recalled opening a bag that looked like “a salad of bones” and another containing only a skull. He said the worst cases were children and infants, including “a small body of a child who was shot, stabbed and run over,” and remains split across separate bags. He also described the smell of decay as impossible to remove, saying they wore two masks and sprayed eucalyptus, but the odor still seeped in. He stopped following the news so he would not recognize the dead, but once heard the names of police officers he had scanned on the radio and realized they had families. Despite sleep, psychological support and army resilience days, he said: “After 300 reserve days in Shura, Yigal Foigel did not return to himself.”