Yossi Landav, 55, has worked in search and rescue for 33 years but nothing could prepare him for what he saw in the aftermath of a Hamas attack in southern Israel which killed at least 1,300 people.
Landav said he was so disturbed that he could not get the images out of his head.
"It's like it's still in front of my eyes," he told Reuters.
First responders from the ZAKA search and rescue organization were dispatched to the south while the Israeli military was still battling thousands of Hamas militants in several locations along the border.
Their task was to rescue people when possible, but mostly to recover bodies.
"I'm not sure I can count anymore how many bodies I saw," Landav said, adding they included "children, babies, mothers, fathers, elderly people, handicapped people."
The attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas was the deadliest in Israel's 75-year history. Most of those killed were civilians.
In response, Israel has bombarded the Gaza Strip, the blockaded Palestinian enclave controlled by Hamas, killing almost 3,000 people. Hamas said a strike on a hospital on Tuesday killed 500. The Israeli military said it did not yet have details on the hospital.
MUTILATED BODIES
Jewish tradition requires burial take place as soon as possible after death, but many of the cases Landav saw required deep forensic analysis to identify the person so the family could be informed, and to find the cause of death.
ZAKA volunteers were the first point of contact in that process, which can be lengthy depending on the severity of injuries.
Itzik Itah, who gave his title as commander of ZAKA, described mutilated bodies in homes.
"We opened a door and we saw a man inside, all burned, with his fingers chopped off. It means they chopped off his fingers, he was able to run into the safe room, and then was burned inside the room, alive," he said.
First responders say residents of the Beeri kibbutz were victims of a particularly violent attack.
"In one (house) there was a couple tied to each other with their clothes down, and you can see definitely, that the woman underwent rape," said Itah.
"When she is naked faced down, and her clothes had clearly been taken off not by her, that's a woman who underwent rape."
Landav said he saw children who had been burned alive.
"It was a massacre I could not imagine," ZAKA volunteer Mendy Habib said. "People shot, burned. You see them in the flats, outside the flats, on the lawn, on the path. That means the whole village, house by house. People dead, corpses everywhere."
