6.30am: It was going to be a happy day, one of the happiest days of the year. Simchat Torah, which was scheduled to start at sundown, at the end of Sabbath, is a Jewish holiday that celebrates the conclusion of the annual cycle of Torah readings. There is a lot of food and dancing. The siren woke up Shari Mendes in her family’s apartment in Jerusalem. Shari and David thought it was a mistake. But the architect and her surgeon husband went down to the shelter in the basement of their building with the other residents, just in case. False alarm. 

They came back upstairs and started to get dressed. “We were getting ready to go to the synagogue, and then there was another siren and another,” Shari recalls. “People kept going back downstairs into the shelter with each siren at a different stage of dress –  half dressed, almost dressed – and it was quite funny.” 

The Mendeses didn’t have their phones switched on because they don’t use electricity or any electrical devices on the Sabbath.

After a while, Arab neighbours came up to show them the news on their phones. “We were horrified,” says Shari. She switched on her own phone to find Emergency Order #8 in Hebrew (tzav shmoneh). She was stunned. “This only happens during a war, right?” 

Order 8 is sent to IDF reservists during an emergency telling them to report immediately to their base. Shari Mendes had never done military service, as all Israelis must when they leave high school. She missed it because she was born and brought up in the United States, only moving to Israel in 2003 to raise her family. Just a couple of years ago, however, she had been approached to be part of a small, all-female unit which would help take care of the bodies of women soldiers in the event of a mass casualty event. In the Jewish tradition, it is women who prepare female bodies for burial. As more young women were seeing frontline service, the army thought it was a necessary precaution.

On Saturday night, Shari drove to the Shura army base and joined her unit. “My first shift was Sunday morning. It was unimaginable. There were refrigerator trucks lining up as far as you could see. There’s this massive intake area like an airport hangar and it was packed with bodies, body bags stacked one on top of each other right up the walls. Hundreds of bodies. The smell was incomprehensible. I’m very sensitive to smells, and I had never smelled this before. It was like the secret smell of death. I don’t even know how to describe it, you couldn’t breathe the smell was so bad. Literally gasping, struggling to breathe. 

“The floors were wet. Fluids were dripping from the bags. There was blood on the floor, so much blood. It was like walking into horror.”

Around Shari and the team, people were working at record speed, putting up sheetrock walls to create new rooms to stack the bodies in, bringing in more and more shipping containers with refrigeration and shelves. A decision had been taken to bring all the casualties of October 7 to the military morgue instead of sending civilian corpses to a hospital. Many of the bodies were so disfigured or destroyed you couldn’t tell if they were soldiers or kibbutzniks or young people from the Nova festival anyway. Some were just ash.

Shari’s first job was in the identification room. “I can’t overemphasise how shocking this was, even to professionals. Like, there were forensic doctors and army photographers and army dentists and army physicians all in this room gathered around a girl’s body trying to establish who she was. Most of the people in my unit have no medical background. We’re normal people, like secretaries or lawyers or retail workers, whatever. And suddenly there we were dealing with things that no one ever thought you could deal with.”

We are sitting at Shari’s kitchen table. Sixty-three-years old, she is both striking and imposing, somehow radiating moral authority, yet also warm and hugely sympathetic. She has baked brownies for me and they smell delicious, but they sit in the tin untouched. The family’s elderly dog sniffs around at our feet. I think I want to know everything, every thing she went through, but do I really?

There’s an imperative in Judaism that the modesty of the dead woman should be respected. Shari says that was what her team were trying to do. “Even in the rush and in the horror, we said, ‘Please, let’s cover the body when no one’s working on it’ and everybody said, ‘Yes, let’s cover her.’ I was very touched by that. You know, that takes sensitivity in the midst of that unimaginable nightmare, and it was our job to do all the touching of the woman that wasn’t medical. 

“If clothes needed to be taken off, we would take them off and it’s important to give back to the family all the personal effects. We were taking things out of pockets like cigarette lighters. Every single thing, we wiped off the blood, put it in a special bag with a number to go into a certain box, to be returned to her parents.” (Shari has a friend down her street whose son was killed. “She told me what it’s like to open that box and how meaningful it is to them.”)

The team did their best to take off the jewellery. “Sometimes, it was very difficult. These young women had nose rings, and their faces were completely smashed up. And me who’s squeamish is working with a dentist trying to take off a nose ring and there’s nothing left of the face but the nose.”

The women were shot many times in the head. “Why? Why? We saw that these women were shot to be killed, maybe in the heart, in the head, but then they were shot many times in the face, and it looked like systematic mutilation because it seemed like they wanted to ruin these women’s faces. A lot of them were young soldier women, and a lot of them had been very beautiful. The first few we saw weren’t too bad because they might have been caught in their sleep and Hamas just shot them. But, after a while, we got women who had clearly been awake when they were murdered and these women came in and their mouths, their teeth were in grimaces and their hands were clenched, if they had hands.

“We got notified that a woman’s coming in and she has no legs, so the terrorist cut off her legs. There was clearly immense sadistic violence.” A lot of the women had bloody, stained underwear, Shari says, some had no underwear at all. “People were shot in the breast, they were shot in the crotch, and that was not done to kill them.” She is a calm, thoughtful person, but her voice is stiff with anger now.

One body Shari dealt with personally still had a knife stuck through her mouth. “There was so much violence and it was totally sexual.”

Shari Mendes went to the United Nations on December 4 to tell them about the sexual violence, the unbelievable depravity she saw inflicted on women and girls. (As well as Jews, they were Christian, Druze, Hindu, Muslim.) It was an incredible speech, but the UN was notably slow to respond to the mass violation of Israeli women giving rise to the hashtag, #MeTooUnlessYoureAJew. “The UN is supposed to represent all nations,” says Shari, “and they had an exhibit on August 17. It was the International Day of people who were killed in conflict and terror attacks. And they showed a picture of every single terrorist attack that happened that year, but they did not include October 7. What does that say about the UN?” They did eventually send the special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict to Israel from January 29 to February 14. Shari and others testified to Pramila Patten. Her report said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October”. That’s not good enough, Shari snaps. “I haven’t heard most women’s organisations condemn the sexual violence. And what about the fact that there are still 101 hostages, living and dead? Including the young woman we saw taken with bloody jogging pants. What’s being done to them? Why are their names not on everyone’s lips? Every. Single. Day.”)

After October 7, Shari and her colleagues worked 12-hour shifts, non-stop for two weeks; they often slept at the base. Their own children were being called up. “I had a son, a daughter-in-law and another son who were on active duty. I didn’t know where they were, were they safe?

“You ask me, Allison, how could I bear it? You asked how we got the strength. I mean, I remember thinking that first day I was just in shock, and everybody was just doing, doing, doing. We were using masks, and they were giving us lavender, but all the senses were being assaulted. By the third, fourth day, I was losing it, and I thought, ‘I don’t know that I can do this anymore’.”

After the bodies had been definitively identified, they were taken to a second room, the burial room, where the atmosphere was calmer “and it was just us women with the woman”.   

The team would look after her, showing all the tender care that was the opposite of her final moments alive. One morning, amidst the grey, they saw a flash of pink. “A beautiful manicure with a flower on each fingernail. And that was such a terrible moment for all of us women because a manicure is such a sign of hope for a woman. They’re making themselves beautiful, aren’t they? It was the only colour in the room.” 

They didn’t wash the bodies. Shari explains that someone who dies in war or in terror, according to Jewish law, is not washed because even that dirt is holy, that they died in a sacrifice for God. “They’re already as holy as they could be. We took our time with them, said a prayer. You put dust of Jerusalem above the eyes. And you ask the person for forgiveness.”

She tried not to know their names. “I didn’t want to associate them with the news stories. I’d go home and learn they had a dog and a sister and a mother who was crying. I made that mistake the first day, and it almost destroyed me. I had to keep going.”

She says she knew she would probably be the last person who saw them “and that’s a responsibility. Because they could have been our daughters.”

Of all the young women whose bodies she took care of and prepared for burial, how many were in a fit state to be shown to their parents?

There is total silence in the room, except for the ticking of a clock on the kitchen wall. I pat the dog beside me, pressing my hand deep into his fur to bring me back to this world and away from that place where jihadi psychopaths annihilate the faces of young women for kicks. 

Shari looks at me. I can’t tell if her eyes are full of sorrow or glittering with rage. “None,” she says at last. “Not one girl we could show to her parents.”

‘I’ve seen what happens to the Jewish people without an army’