Ricardo Nachman, An Argentine doctor who has lived in Israel for more than three decades, Nachman described the harsh reality of the hostages recovered in Gaza. “What I am going to show you is what I saw, nobody told me,” Nachman said before projecting shocking images in a Zoom conversation.
Nachman, who heads Israel’s only National Center for Clinical Forensic Medicine and coordinates teams of professionals who receive freed or rescued hostages, recounted the horrors of the Hamas assault on October 7. Burned, mutilated, and abused bodies were all things he saw and detailed in conversation with the Argentine newspaper La Nación.
In his meeting with journalists at the residence of the Israeli ambassador in Argentina, Nachman showed recovered human remains. “They knew very well what they were doing: they tried to make the bodies disappear,” he said, explaining that the terrorists used accelerants to burn the victims’ bodies.
The images Nachman presented were devastating: charred fragments of skulls, jaws and ribs. He pointed out how technology helped identify remains, such as two female skulls found using CT scans.
“Obviously I didn’t sleep for months,” confessed Nachman, who went from working 42 hours a week to 142 after the attack. He mentioned heartbreaking cases, such as that of a 12-year-old girl identified by small fragments of her spinal column.
The psychological impact of these findings deeply affected Nachman and his team. “Something that broke us was seeing a child and an adult burned, glued and tied with wires,” he said. Despite his vast forensic experience, Nachman admitted that nothing prepared him for this tragedy.
The released hostages return in deplorable physical and psychological conditions. “They all returned malnourished, beaten, with scars and fractures,” Nachman said, describing the difficult conditions of captivity: poor food, limited hygiene and lack of sunlight.
In addition, testimonies of sexual assaults emerged, as reflected in reports from the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel and the UN. Nachman highlighted the complexity of documenting these cases due to the “pact of silence” among some hostages for fear of reprisals.
Despite everything, Nachman remains focused on his work. “99.99% of the bodies that were recovered [en Gaza] “They were in a state of advanced putrefaction,” he mentioned, underscoring the need for identification to provide closure to affected families.
