Special teams from the Military Rabbinate, intelligence personnel, and members of the special IDF Hostages & Missing Persons Command headed by Major General (res.) Nitzan Alon, together with a special team from the Ministry of Religious Services headed by the Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak Yossef, have been meeting frequently over the last few days to discuss the new information with which they have been provided, and which in practice has enabled them to officially announce the names of "new" victims murdered on the October 7 massacre. It was in this manner that the IDF was able to declare on Shabbat, that Colonel Assaf Hamami, the commander of the IDF's Southern Gaza Brigade, and others, had been killed. In a separate effort, during the ongoing military campaign, the IDF also succeeded in bringing back to Israel the bodies of three dead Israelis, including that of Ofir Sarfati OBM, whose family was informed of his murder at the weekend.
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In essence, this effort has involved two teams, a military and a civilian team, one headed by the IDF's Chief Military Rabbi and the other established by the Ministry of Religious Services Director General, Yehuda Avidan, headed by the Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak Yossef, working on the identification of both the civilian and military dead. The new information is channeled into these two teams via intelligence and IDF personnel in possession of the appropriate information, as well as information gleaned from the numerous hostages who have returned from Gaza over the last week, which the officials have managed to cross-reference with an abundance of information already available to Israel.
The information collected from all possible channels since the outbreak of the war, for example, such as the report of one of the now-released hostages, who during her hospitalization, personally witnessed the death of another hostage next to her, has enabled the authorities to piece together a reliable picture, allowing the rabbis to declare those individuals to be dead in accordance with Jewish law. The information received at Nitzan Alon's Hostages & Missing Persons Command, has been collected over the course of the last few weeks, but only when sufficient credible information has been accumulated, which is then presented to the Chief Rabbi, is it possible to make an announcement regarding an individual's death. An official involved in this process has told Israel Hayom that the hostages provided information on a considerable degree of "movement" during their forced imprisonment in Gaza, enabling them to accumulate information that was then presented to various Israeli intelligence experts on their return here to Israel.
Video: IDF vows to release hostages / Credit:X/@IDF
The work on the civilian team has involved considerably greater complexities, as its members were required to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement), as the material presented to them has been defined as bearing a national security level classification. To a certain extent, the effort led by Rabbi Yossef constitutes a rather chilling sequel to similar work carried out by his later father, Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, who was forced to determine the deaths of numerous soldiers killed during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
The person responsible for establishing this special team, is Yehuda Avidan, Director General of the Ministry of Religious Services, the government ministry responsible for burial in Israel. Rabbi Ido Shahar, a Dayan, or religious judge of the Great Rabbinical Court, serves on the team under Rabbi Yossef, along with the IDF's Chief Military Rabbi, Eyal Krim. Over the weekend, members of the health and defense establishment appeared before the rabbis and presented to them the data that eventually led the Chief Rabbi to the conclusion that it would be possible to declare the deaths of those Israelis who had been murdered. This decision has a direct impact on and an unprecedented contribution to, among others, the widows of the slain who will now not be defined as agunot (women trapped in marital status for halachic reasons), in a situation whereby the bodies of their husbands still remain in captivity with Hamas. To date, this working method has enabled the authorities to identify five Israeli civilians as having been murdered by Hamas.
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