in Israel, members of the ultraorthodox Jewish association Zaka accused of lying

The Israeli daily Haaretz revealed this week that the Zaka association altered crime scenes during attacks carried out by Hamas.

Zaka is an ultra-Orthodox Jewish association which, for years, has been gathering pieces of corpses after attacks to bury them whole, according to Jewish tradition. But after the attacks of October 7, some of its members allegedly lied and obstructed investigations. An investigation published on Wednesday January 31 in the very serious Israeli daily Haaretz reveals that Zaka, the good Samaritans of Judaism, were very far from being exemplary.

It’s October 7, there’s carnage around Gaza. Nearly 1,200 bodies litter the streets of the towns of Sderot, Ofakim and the Reim festival. Burned corpses are found in shelters and houses in the Kibbutz closest to the enclave. Israel is stunned and the population discovers with fear, in the early morning, the first videos of the attack. The emergency services were overwhelmed and very quickly the members of Zaka occupied the ground. They collect the bodies of victims, long before the scientific police can intervene. They are therefore the first to work on these crime scenes, which must absolutely not be tampered with at that time.

But what do we blame the Zaka volunteers for? First of all, for having done their job poorly: they transmitted to the coroners bodies which were not whole. For example, a volunteer speaks of body bags in which he found two skulls, making it impossible to seriously determine the causes of certain deaths.

Lies to the press and donations poured in

More seriously, Zaka would have negotiated a sort of exclusivity on the collection of corpses and around a hundred soldiers, although specialized in this type of mission, were not mobilized. Today it is some of them who are testifying and we can imagine that if they had intervened, the evidence of possible war crimes would have been easier to collect. Finally, Zaka is accused of having taken advantage of the situation to promote himself. Some of its members covered the army’s black body bags with other bags with the association’s logo. They brought donors to the scene of the carnage, without authorization. They also filmed videos on site highlighting their actions.

And then they lied to the press, exaggerating the horror. I will spare you the details of these testimonies which later turned out to be false… But how can we explain that such an important association engaged in such practices? According to the author of the investigation, journalist Aaron Rabinowitcz, it is a story of money. Before October 7, the Zaka association in Jerusalem was in debt. These financial difficulties followed a sex scandal denounced by the same journalist three years ago. But from October 8, Zaka launched a donation campaign and raised more than 10 million euros. The State also came out of its own pocket: Zaka volunteers cleaned 500 houses and the association received around 150,000 euros of public money.