The charred remains were so mutilated that they initially did not realize they were two people.

But when pathologists began to carefully examine, they could see that the bodies were those of an adult and a child. And they hugged each other tightly.

That’s how it ended for them, trapped in a room while Hamas terrorists burned down their house. As the horror of the burning to death dawned on them, the adult had no choice but to hold that terrified child in their arms.

And as excruciating as that is, it is by no means an isolated case here at Israel’s National Center for Forensic Medicine, where the bodies of the victims of the Hamas attack are being identified. Scientists charged with this grim task told me that it is common practice to carefully separate the fused remains of two helpless people, who in their final moments had concluded that all they could do was embrace death.

No wonder several professional pathologists burst into tears yesterday as they tried to explain their crucial work to me.

The Israeli Ministry of Health and Foreign Affairs shows the press where the bodies of the murdered people are being examined and identified

When pathologists began to carefully examine, they could see that the bodies were those of an adult and a child. And they hugged each other tightly

This is the real-life version of Silent Witness, the television drama about pathology experts who collect forensic clues to solve a case.

Of the 959 bodies brought to the Shura military base so far, the most difficult to identify are taken to the forensic center here in Tel Aviv, where teams of scientists work around the clock to find out who they are.

They are well aware that the anguished families of the missing are beyond desperate – they just need to know.

The work itself could hardly be more disturbing. Some victims were shot and then set on fire, others were tied with wire ropes and sentenced to a fiery hell.

Yesterday there were 297 bodies that had been so horribly abused that they were unrecognizable to anyone. It is the miserable job of these pathologists to solve this.

Sometimes all they need are a few bone fragments. That’s literally all there is left of anyone.

Chen Kugel, director of the center, showed me a pile of bones. “There are several people there,” he said. ‘Just parts of a skull. A cheekbone. This is all that remains of them. Their bodies are gone.”

He showed me pictures of a man shot from behind. ‘You can see from his wrist prints that he was handcuffed behind his back. And then executed.”

And then came the completely unbearable thing. Dr. Kugel cried as he described how they had received remains that were so disfigured that they had to perform a CT scan to understand that there were two bodies. One big, one small.

He showed me the scan and said, ‘You can see from the shape of their spine that they are an adult and a child, and they are sitting together and hugging tightly.

‘In their final moments. They were burned like that. Cremated alive in their own home, holding each other.’

Dr. Kugel, a forensic pathologist for 31 years, continued to breathe deeply but couldn’t hold back his tears.

“This is heartbreaking and hard to watch, even for people like me who have been doing this for so many years,” he said.

Everywhere I looked as I walked through this morgue yesterday was a vision of hell. The sight is too harrowing to describe and the putrid stench of death will stay with me for days. Many of the innocents slaughtered have gunshot wounds in their hands as they tried in vain to defend themselves from the bullets.

Dr. Kugel said, “It’s terrible. It’s so big. And there are so many containers – it’s like a shipping port – and they’re all full of bodies. It’s so terrible. So much… it’s the extent of the cruelty.”

His team’s job is to identify the victims so that their anguished families can be informed as quickly as possible and find out how they died.

Pictured is the head of a DNA laboratory, Dr. Nurit BuBlil, showing a child’s mattress smeared with blood

He said soot in a person’s windpipe indicated he was alive and breathing smoke — and that he died by fire rather than a gun.

“We’re doing CT scans, biopsies, we’re checking DNA and fingerprints – if there are any fingers left – and any clues we can find,” he said.

“But we are now dealing with the most difficult cases to solve. I’m afraid there will be people we will never identify. People have to be prepared for this.’

In every room I visited, exhausted teams did their best with blackened bodies, bone fragments, and whatever else they could find. The victims range from the very old to the very young. In a hallway I passed three body bags that were a third the size of adult ones.

What about decapitated babies? Yes, said Dr. Kugel, it was true.

Amid horrors that defy belief, an extraordinary debate took place over the past week over whether Hamas savages had beheaded defenseless babies or merely shot them dead. Reports of beheadings have been furiously attacked as fake news by some high-profile doubters.

It seems grotesque that we are even trying to get to the bottom of how a baby was decapitated.

But there are some who refuse to believe that even the terror group’s most sadistic fanatics would have indulged in such evil.

On Saturday I spoke with a colonel who told me that he had not only seen a decapitated baby, but also held it in his arms when he picked up the child from a slaughter site in Kibbutz Be’eri. Yesterday, with a heavy heart, I asked Dr. Kugel, perhaps the oldest pathologist in Israel, if he had seen headless babies. He replied, ‘Yes. Yes, I saw that.’

He didn’t know why they had no heads and couldn’t tell if they had been cut off with a knife or blown away by an exploding grenade. He said, ‘I can’t say. I can say that I have seen people without heads.’

Kibbutz Be’eri, 4 km from the Gaza border, was attacked by Hamas militants last Saturday, October 7

This is the real-life version of Silent Witness, the television drama about pathology experts who collect forensic clues to solve a case

However it happened, the toll taken on scientists whose search for the facts means they cannot avert their eyes from such unspeakable horror is all too evident.

During a much-needed break for fresh air outside, Dr. Kugel said to me, “We work there in the world of the dead. But when I come out here to the living world and talk to you and the sun is shining, it’s like normal… only it’s not.”

Somewhere in every fragment of charred and twisted body parts lies a vital forensic clue that could bring some kind of grim closure to a family trapped in the hellish limbo of not knowing whether their loved one is dead, kidnapped, or wandering lost and injured. Dr. Ricardo Nachman, head of the centre’s forensic department, said: ‘In one body bag we found three left feet and one right foot. So we know there are at least three people who died together.” Elsewhere, they might find one person – in more than one bag.

Upstairs in the DNA laboratory they examine the smallest fragments to identify the owner.

Head of the laboratory, Dr. Nurit Bublil, told me: ‘We are doing everything we can. In severely burned samples, it can take days to obtain a genetic profile. We know the families are waiting. Hopefully we can get everyone home again.

‘Many people work day and night. We want to give the answers to their families. They want to experience the funerals, but they also want to know what happened and how their loved one died. The research takes time. We have the professionalism to do it. And we want to do it.”

She said the Hamas terrorists “entered Israel and took pleasure in slaughtering civilians. This was an inhumane act.” Her job, she explained, was “to work and cry at the same time.” She wasn’t wrong. Dr. Bublil stood talking to me next to a small, blood-soaked mattress. She picked it up and showed me: ‘This is a mattress from a baby crib. You can see the size of this bloodstain – which means this baby was bleeding on this bed.”

There were no more words. She kept trying, but there was nothing else to say. Dazed and forlorn, Dr. Bublil shuffled across her laboratory to her colleague and burst into tears.