Death and Donations: Did the Israeli Volunteer Group Handling the Dead of October 7 Exploit Its Role?

 The Zaka volunteer group began collecting bodies in the devastated communities of southern Israel immediately after the Hamas attack, while the IDF sidelined soldiers trained to retrieve remains. An investigation reveals cases of negligence, misinformation and a fundraising campaign that used the dead as props   

A group of people sit around a plastic table, taking shelter under the branches of a tree on a hot day. The atmosphere is relaxed, and the conversation flows. Some smoke cigarettes, while others sip soft drinks and nibble on snacks. A young woman is perched on a nearby bench, engrossed in her phone. The environment is pastoral in God's little acre.

Even the body on the ground next to them, wrapped in a white plastic bag, doesn't disturb the scene. It's not external to the story; it's a part of it. 

This moment took place in Kfar Azza early in the second week of the war against Hamas. The group sitting among the burned houses and devastation consists of some 10 volunteers from the Jerusalem branch of Zaka, the ultra-Orthodox organization that retrieves human remains after attacks and disasters. The white body bag is marked with the organization's logo.

"It was just bizarre that there was a corpse right there next to them, and they were sitting around, eating, and smoking," said one of two volunteers from a different organization who were present. "It's unbelievable."

The non-Zaka volunteers asked them why they weren't transferring the body into an ambulance or the refrigerated truck parked across the road. They replied indifferently that it would be taken care of later and returned to their diversions. 

Approaching the group a little more closely revealed that three of the Zaka volunteers were making video calls and videos for fundraising purposes. According to the non-Zaka observer, the body was part of a staged setting – an exhibit designed to attract donors, just when the race against time to gather and remove the bodies of victims of the massacre was most urgent.

"They opened a war room for donations there," said another witness to the event, who has worked throughout the war in the Gaza border communities attacked on October 7. "Two weeks later, I saw them acting similarly in Be'eri as well – sitting and making videos and fundraising calls inside the kibbutz."

Zaka responded to this description with a statement saying that "No fundraising calls were made on the ground on behalf of the organization, and if any specific incident is brought to our attention, we will examine and deal with it."

A Haaretz investigation raises several questions about procedures during the retrieval of the bodies. It is based on the accounts of military personnel present at the body retrievals and the Shura military base (which was made a body identification center), as well as volunteers from Zaka and other rescue organizations who worked in the border communities.

It's clear that hundreds of Zaka Jerusalem volunteers did important work by collecting victims' bodies under challenging conditions. At the same time, some of the organization's activities – which, on the eve of the war, was entangled in debts of millions of shekels – were directed towards fundraising, public relations, media interviews, and tours for donors.  

In the first and critical days of the war, the IDF decided to forego the deployment of hundreds of soldiers specifically trained in the identification and collection of human remains in mass casualty incidents. Instead, the Home Front Command chose to use Zaka, a private organization, alongside soldiers in the Military Rabbinate's search unit, known by the acronym Yasar, for the south.

More personnel were necessary, but when the soldiers of the Military Rabbinate's search unit in the north and the Home Front Command's unit for collecting fallen soldiers reported for reserve duty on October 7, they were told they had to wait.

I have no explanation for why they didn't deploy [the Home Front Command's unit] and our people from the north," says an officer in Rabbinate's southern search unit.

Officers at the Shura base were also unable to explain why the military didn't deploy the personnel who had already been called up, all of them combat soldiers who knew how to operate under fire. An officer in the Home Front Command's unit said that his commanders "begged" senior leadership for their deployment but were rebuffed. It wasn't until the second week of the war that these soldiers began to operate in the area – and even then, not fully.

In the meantime, Zaka volunteers were there. Most of them worked at the sites of murder and destruction from morning to night. However, according to witness accounts, it becomes clear that others were engaged in other activities entirely. As part of the effort to get media exposure, Zaka spread accounts of atrocities that never happened, released sensitive and graphic photos, and acted unprofessionally on the ground.

There was a price for choosing Zaka, say sources at Shura. "We received bags of theirs without documentation, and sometimes with body parts that were unrelated to one another," says an officer in the camp. Such problems made the identification process very difficult, he says. Some bags came many days after the outbreak of the war, he adds.

One of the volunteers who worked at Shura says: "There were bags with two skulls, bags with two hands, with no way to know which was whose."

continued    https://archive.is/VXWuT#selection-963.0-1111.140