The first call came at 7:30 pm on Oct. 7.
A terrified Israeli army officer was on the other end of the phone. “How long,” he wanted to know, “Does it take for a body to rot?”
Haim Otmezgin, a senior member of an Orthodox Jewish group called Zaka that recovers the bodies of dead Jews and prepares them for burial, already knew he was dealing with a massacre. But he had no idea of the extent of the hell he was to live for the next several days as he led efforts by the volunteer group to recover and prepare for burial the bodies of nearly 1,200 people killed by Hamas and other terrorists that morning.
Taken aback, Otmezgin told the officer he needed more details. “I have a carpet of dead bodies in the middle of the forest, I don’t know what to do with them,” he was told.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Otmezgin recounted his days bringing back the bodies from the site of the Nova music festival, where over 300 young people were killed in the early morning hours.
He said he had to “become a machine,” and make some difficult decisions as he drove his ambulance from the group’s headquarters to the scene of the massacre. As he got closer to the site of the killings, he saw people waving at his ambulance.
“I started thinking ‘I know I need to get south, but maybe in order to prepare for this, I should let myself into this situation slowly and see what these people want to say,‘“ he recalled. “I thought that they probably want to tell me something about what’s going on in the south.”
“They said: ‘We have two of them,’ and I asked ‘What two? What are you talking about?’ “
The people showed him the bodies of two women, both shot in the head. He put the corpses in his van and drove on.
More and more civilians tried flagging him down as he made his way toward the festival, each one holding a different person slaughtered by Hamas fighters, who were still rampaging throughout southern Israel.
Haim said he had to make the very difficult decision to keep going despite the number of bodies he saw on the road. “We needed at least 15 ambulances and a few trucks to take all the dead bodies that were found on the way to the festival,” he said.
When he reached the festival site, he began to understand the horror in the voice of the Israeli officer who had called him earlier.
Ometzgin remembers the many mutilated bodies. “Organs were separated from their bodies, women had been shot in their very private areas, the upper parts of their legs, their heads. Women were undressed and then they were shot,” he said.
That’s when Ometzgin said he “made the transition from being a human being to a machine.”
“Many [bodies] needed to have water poured on them because they were still burning 12 hours later,” he said, because the dead had been soaked with fuel before being set alight.
Hamas didn’t just use fire as a weapon of war against partygoers at the festival. Sexual violence was used to humiliate the victims at the site, many of whom were young women.
In line with Jewish customs, his team had to clear as many bodies as possible. He said ZAKA was able to recover 237 bodies in just four hours, while still under fire from Hamas’ rockets and guns. But with dozens more bodies at the Nova festival site, and hundreds more across Israel, Ometzgin said the work took a physical toll on him.
“I didn’t stop working for 60 days. I was only getting four hours of sleep a night, and I lost 9 kilos in two months because I didn’t have time to eat,” he said. He wouldn’t discuss what he saw with his children or with friends and neighbors, but what he saw made one thing very clear to him.
Black Saturday, as the Oct. 7 massacre is called in Israel, was a wakeup call, Ometzgin said.
“It revealed the reality of how naive we were about the values of war. This war was about humiliating us. It was about deep hate, it was about defiling us.”
