In Israeli Lab, Some of Dead Get No Rest

The broken bodies crowd the steel refrigerators out back, but nobody knows what to do with them. What little is left of 25 suicide bombers and snipers has been piling up for weeks. Usually, there is nothing but a Palestinian head and a pair of Palestinian feet, perhaps a charred Palestinian finger or a shard of Palestinian spine.

The burned bits are all that remain of dead militants, men and women who slipped across the line from the Palestinian territories, who came to kill and came to die. When the mission is over, when the streets are washed clean and the Jews have come to carry the bones of their kin into the hills for burial--when everybody has gone home, the Palestinians stay, chilled and forgotten.

The bodies are an awkward reminder of another breakdown between two warring people. Palestinians don’t venture into Israel any more to gather the remains of their dead. Maybe they are frightened, as the investigators here at the only forensics laboratory in this bloody nation believe. Or maybe the harsh net of curfews, roadblocks and fences has made the journey impossible.

The technicians grumble, and the director frets, and the Israeli public complains, but the bodies stay. The attorney general’s office is expected to hammer out some sort of policy on the treatment of unclaimed Palestinian corpses, but it’s no simple task. Here in Israel--a nation spitting with rage over Palestinian attacks, but still a nation where the rituals of death are hallowed and bodies are sacred--nobody knows what to do with the corpses of the enemy.

“It’s hard for me even to say it, but the terrorist is still entitled to be treated as a human body,” Health Ministry spokesman Ido Hadari says. “Many Israelis say one who kills babies and schoolgirls is not somebody who can be called human.”

In the laboratory of forensic director Yehuda Hiss, the mystery of life is reduced to the science of fingerprints and blood samples, tattoos and DNA. “Once you smell it,” he says, “you never forget.”

The laboratory’s grounds near Tel Aviv look like a defunct summer camp, a smattering of cottages lush with blooming vines and cool pine groves. This used to be a private Mediterranean resort, the playground of a wealthy Arab family whose name, Abu Kabir, still graces the complex. In the bloodshed of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, Jews seized this and other land from fleeing Arabs.

Now, the remains of Israelis and their Arab assassins are examined side by side in what used to be the family’s stables. “Once they’re dead, they’re dead,” Hiss says. “There’s no difference anymore.”

After a suicide attack, when the scraps of flesh and bone are brought here and spread across his metal tables, Hiss picks out the bomber at a glance. The bombs are cinched about the waist, and the explosion tends to send the killer’s feet and head flying out of fire’s range. When the smoke clears, that’s usually all that’s left. “You know how many of these I’ve done?” Hiss says. “I can tell in a second.”

There was a time when Palestinians made the trip to claim their dead. The mothers and brothers slipped over the line from the refugee camps and villages, padded gray and grave into Hiss’ office and said, “I think this is my son.” They rolled up their sleeves and offered to have their blood drawn so the body could be identified.

Not anymore. Everybody knows what happens to the families of suicide bombers. Israeli soldiers come with bombs and bulldozers to turn the family house to dust and pebbles. The survivors are pushed into the street. Entire villages are usually interrogated and harassed.

Even the militant groups that once stepped forward to crow over the attacks have grown more hesitant to release a name, a village, or a videotape. They want to protect the families, they say. And even if Hamas, Islamic Jihad or another group identifies the bomber, that is irrelevant to Hiss: At Abu Kabir, identity is gleaned only from scientific analysis.

In this religious land of perpetual warfare, the rites of death do a delicate dance with the rules of combat. Because both Jews and Muslims are supposed to bury corpses by sundown, the hours after a killing are strained with pressure to collect the bodies and take them back to home soil.

Militant Palestinian organizations used to steal their fighters’ corpses from hospitals and bury them before Israeli soldiers could figure out who they were. In March, when the morgue in Ramallah overflowed, Israel eased the siege on the West Bank city long enough to allow the dead to be buried. Mourning Palestinians dug a gaping grave in the dirt of a parking lot, buried the bodies en masse, and went back to war.

Because Hiss is running out of storage space, he has struck a clumsy compromise: When three months have passed, he sends the Palestinian bodies to be buried in a collective plot on Israeli soil.

He doesn’t much like to do it, because he knows the families have a way of showing up sooner or later. He’s had Jordanian relatives stroll into his office and ask him to dig up bodies that have been in the ground eight years, a decade, from the days of the first grueling intifada that began in 1987. “There was skeleton only,” he says with a grim shake of his head.

The Jewish families are different. They flock here by the hundreds, sometimes, after the very worst attacks. When sirens scream and death counts drone over the airwaves, frantic families swarm past the security guards and into the compound, slam their cars into a crazy quilt of metal, and scramble into the office.

They register the names and the ages of the missing, give the sad narratives that explain why he might have been on that bus, why she could have eaten in that restaurant, danced at that discotheque. “There’s no answer on the mobile,” they say. And then they wait.

When they’re called to Hiss’ office, they know what it means. They look at the white beard and glasses and neat necktie, and they often say the same thing: I never thought I’d meet you in person. I never believed I’d see your face. “When they see me, they know it’s the end,” Hiss says. Israeli news has dubbed him the “Angel of Death.”

“I always tell them, don’t look at the bodies. I speak on behalf of the dead,” he says. “I tell them it’s better to remember them alive and beautiful than covered with blood, dust, metal.”

But almost without exception, they want to see. Even if there’s nothing left but a finger or a jaw or a skull, they want to see. “It’s the worst part,” Hiss says. “It’s never clean.”

Now, for the first time in Hiss’ 17 years here, there is a victim nobody knows. Was he homeless or friendless, a tourist or a foreign worker? The morning of June 5, he boarded a bus filled with soldiers and rode through the sunflower fields of northern Israel. He and 16 others died when the bus was bombed at the Megiddo junction.

He was middle-aged, maybe 40, maybe 60, about 5 foot 2. They’ve run newspaper stories and fielded calls from Russia and Poland.

No use. No match. If they don’t find his home soon, he too will be buried in the blank earth. He will get a number.

He will crumble into dust without a name.