‘He came to murder and rape’ – Oct. 7 terrorist carried grenades and condoms

Shlomo Efrati is haunted by the weeks he spent helping to identify victims of the terrorist massacre.

By Batya Jerenberg, Word Israel News

Shlomo Efrati saw pure evil in the weeks following the Hamas-led invasion and massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023, in his IDF job of identifying hundreds of victims, he told Israeläs Channel 12 TV news in a painful interview on Friday, still haunted by the unimaginable sights he saw.

He and his reserve unit were called up on October 8 and sent to Camp Shura, where the IDF Rabbinate worked as quickly as possible to identify more than 1,000 bodies and prepare them for a dignified burial.

Efrati and his partner, Oded Kind, were told to take the fingerprints of civilians such as Nova festival goers and kibbutz members, as well as policemen and soldiers who were brought by the truckload in body bags to the facility.

It was a horrific job, he said, and “Everyone fell apart there in a different way, it got to everyone in the end.”

He tried to cope with the trauma by “going into automatic mode,” he said, to look only for the hands and taking the fingerprints as quickly as he could, but he couldn’t help seeing the condition of the bodies, “the burned and the half-burned, the mangled, everything.”

The terrorists who assaulted the Nova dance festival near the Gaza border burned many victims to death after tying them up, and raped innumerable young women before killing them as well.

Efrati saw more than one of the murderers, as their bodies were sometimes mistakenly sent to Shura along with their victims.

In one case, “As soon as we opened the bag, we realized that it was an Arab body: flip-flops and a long nail on his little finger, a ring with a black stone and a Quran in his pocket,” he recalled.

The attire told Efrati that this man was not a trained Hamas soldier but “a resident who joined, just like that, on the way.”

His other pocket contained something more dangerous – three grenades, which necessitated the removal of everyone from the room so that a bomb disposal team could deal with them safely.

He was also “shocked,” he said, at something else he found on the man – a pack of condoms.

“He came to murder and rape,” Efrati said. “That’s the moment you realize that you’re dealing with pure evil. This is not a man who came to fight for his land, this is a man who came to satisfy his darkest desires.”

In all, he and his partner took 700 sets of fingerprints, including from bodies of soldiers about whom they were told “There’s nothing to take, you won’t succeed,” he said.

“My partner took it as his life’s mission, he’s the national champion in fingerprinting. It was a sacred mission for us,” he noted.

“You’re doing it for the people of Israel and for your children, for the parents and children of the people you’re taking care of,” he said.

In an attempt to exorcise the horrors he witnessed, Efrati wrote poems at the end of every 12-hour shift, but he knew that he would need professional help in the end to deal with the trauma.

He has also been affected by his “regular” reservist job – identifying soldiers killed in action once the IDF invaded Gaza, many of whom died in explosions and their mangled remains were brought to Shura as well.

Through his pain, his sense of mission remained whole, however.

“A soldier who arrives in uniform – that’s the most sacred thing in my eyes,” Efrati said. “It’s the highest sense of holiness that can be described, there’s nothing holier than that, he’s fighting for you, for the people of Israel, against the infinite evil that exists in the world.”

“You do everything for the person and his parents, who will soon come here to say goodbye to him, so that they can see his face and stand by the coffin and see him for the last time.”

bodiesHamas massacreIsrael-Hamas warOct. 7th victims