BBC News Brazil
Relatives of all Israelis who die in military operations or in attacks deemed terrorist by the government will receive special support, including a visit from an army officer to officially announce the death.
But since a Hamas attack killed more than 1,400 people in the country, demand for these services has reached unprecedented levels. For this reason, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials, who are not normally involved in communicating with victims’ families, were called in for this mission.
The Brazilian Rafael (fictitious name) is a major in the Israeli army and was one of those summoned. Since last Friday (13), he has been visiting an average of three families a day to break the news of the death of a loved one.
“When I knock on the doors of these families, I feel like an angel of death,” he told BBC News Brasil.
“But I know this work is very important because it gives the family the opportunity to be sure about what happened to their loved one and to be able to bury them.”
This is the first time Rafael has taken on this role. The Brazilian from Rio de Janeiro has been in the Israeli army for 14 years and works in legal advice for the IDF.
“There are people in the army who perform this role regularly, but as the number of deaths reached gigantic proportions, the number of officers trained for this type of mission was not sufficient,” he says.
The soldier says he trained for four hours before starting the task. “In our preparation it was said that we could be very shaken, especially in the first few days, with no appetite and no sleep,” he says. “And that’s really what happens it’s hard to sleep and eat.”
“But I logically continue to eat my meals and try to sleep, because I know that if I don’t, there will be one, two, three, four, five more families who will not receive information about their loved ones.”
Rafael says that some of the visits that impressed him most were to the homes of families with children and teenagers.
In one of them he had to break the news of the death of a 17yearold girl to her father. She was spending the night with her boyfriend on a beach near the Gaza Strip when the couple was attacked by Hamas.
“When we broke the news to this father, he said that the day before he had seen a photo of his daughter on television with the people believed to have been kidnapped,” he says.
“He said he had some hope if anyone can hope for the abduction of a child that she was still alive.”
On another occasion, he visited the parents of a 30yearold woman who was murdered in her own home. Her husband is missing.
The couple’s twin sons survived at 10 months old. “The parents managed to get them into the bunker and lock the room before the terrorists arrived,” he reports.
“It was very difficult, I can’t stop thinking about the families. They are parents who will never see their children again, they are children who will grow up without their parents.”
According to Rafael, many families of the victims of the October 7 attack have to wait many days to receive news about their loved ones.
“It is difficult to recognize the bodies as some of them are completely destroyed. Therefore, it takes some time for confirmation of deaths to arrive,” he said.
“More than 600 people are missing and many of them are unfortunately dead, but identification of the bodies has not yet been possible.”
Rafael has lived in Israel for 20 years. “I am a Zionist Jew and I know that the state of Israel is focused on welcoming Jews from all over the world,” he says.
“But I really like Brazil and visit it often. It is a country that welcomed my grandfather, who survived the Holocaust, very well.”
The incursion on the 7th was considered the worst crossborder attack Israel had faced in more than a generation.
Hamas members broke through the fence separating Gaza from Israel in several places, raided villages and killed more than 1,400 people. The military estimates that around 199 people were kidnapped.
Terrorists also fired thousands of rockets from the Gaza Strip, some of which even hit distant cities such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
In response, Israel launched a wave of airstrikes against the Gaza Strip in the following days. The death toll in Gaza from Israeli retaliatory bombings reached 2,800 people this Monday (16).
In addition, according to the Palestinian authorities, around a thousand people are missing in the rubble of bombed buildings.
Last weekend, the Israeli Defense Forces also announced that they were preparing for new attacks on Gaza by land, air and sea. More than 1.1 million Palestinians living in northern Gaza are leaving the region to escape the threat of attack.
The humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian enclave is becoming increasingly acute. There are growing fears of a regional escalation that could also involve other countries in the region such as Lebanon and Iran.
This text was originally published here.