Inside the Israeli lab 'reassembling and reconnecting' the mangled bodies of the dead

TEL AVIV, Israel — A bone. A tooth. A sliver of skull. They came in bags, endless bags, mixed with ash, coins, bullets and shrapnel. Like imperfect tapestries, some held the remains of different people. The bags were numbered, cataloged and scanned. DNA was extracted. The science was precise, but it was hard to know what happened, how a person was killed.

One bag, which held clues to the final seconds of life, unnerved and intrigued Dr. Chen Kugel, head of the National Institute of Forensic Medicine here. Since Oct. 7, his staff has been working on identifying the remains of some of the 1,200 people killed by Hamas militants. He has been trying to understand not only the causes of death but the underlying hate. Both, he said, often lie beyond one's imagination.

He pointed to a computer screen.

"This is a piece of something that looks like charcoal," he said. "But then you see it through a CT scan, and you see two spines, one of an adult and one of someone younger, maybe 10 or 12 years old. And two sets of ribs. You can see they are roped around with this metal wire. These were people who were hugging one another and burned while they were tied together. It might be a parent and a child."

So many the bags were bigger; the remains, more definable. But since then, like a stain that fades but never goes away, the bags, and what's inside them, have grown smaller in the realm where science and loss intersect.