Further reports are coming to light this week about a baby who was found burned to death in an oven in the wake of the Hamas terror attacks on October 7 in southern Israel. In a recorded account seen by The New York Sun, a first responder, Asher Moskowitz, a member of an Israel Police recovery team and deputy head of the Elad branch of the United Hatzalah EMS organization, recalls handling the child’s body on the 4th day after the attack.Recorded account of a first responder, Asher Moskowitz, a deputy head of the Elad branch of the United Hatzalah EMS organization. Via YouTube The incident took place at the IDF rabbinate’s Shura base in central Israel. The bodies of most of the more than 1,400 Israelis who perished in the attack were taken to the base for processing and identification. In a small bag that arrived in a truck carrying bodies from Kfar Aza, Mr. Moskowitz related, his team found an infant with “the body hardened and with the markings of a heating element.” “As far as I could see,” Mr. Moskowitz says, “the body became swollen and as a result the heating element of the oven had been touching the body itself.” “They told us afterwards,” he said, citing other colleagues involved in processing the body, that as far as they were able to tell, “While the baby was still alive they put him into the oven and they cooked the baby alive.” The case first came to light on Saturday when the president of United Hatzalah, Eli Beer, recounted the story, among those of other atrocities from the attack, at a large meeting of Republican Jewish Coalition members at Las Vegas. This reporter was present at the coalition event when Mr. Beer related this story. “We saw a little baby in an oven,” he said, in remarks that were cited on X by this reporter and viewed more than 16 million times. By “we” Mr. Beer was referring to the volunteers for his ambulance service, who were among the first responders on the scene. Mr. Beer told the Sun in an interview that he first heard of the discovery soon after it had occurred from a volunteer on the scene. He later heard about it from others, including Mr. Moskowitz, after they encountered the infant’s body at Shura.Additional details come from a reservist of the Israel Defense Forces, Colonel Olivier Rafowicz, who briefed a group of visiting parliament members from various European countries at the Shura base on Monday.“They told me,” he says in video footage of the briefing, referencing IDF staff at Shura, “that they found the body of a baby. He was actually burned, I believe, alive in an oven.”Mr. Beer, whose United Hatzalah had some 900 volunteers on the ground in the vicinity of the attack and were among the first to arrive at the scene, believes that reports of further atrocities will continue to emerge in the coming weeks and days. “Our volunteers were focused on their jobs. There was so much to do. They don’t walk around with cameras or talk to the media. They carry medical supplies and injured people. Many of them are still too traumatized to talk about what they saw,” Mr. Beer told the Sun. Two of Mr. Beer’s volunteers, including an Arab-Israeli, Awad Darawashe, were killed in the attack. The children of other volunteers were kidnapped by Hamas and are being held in Gaza, United Hatzalah’s spokesman, Raphael Poch, told the Sun.Questions remain about what exactly unfolded in the house where the baby was found, Mr. Beer says. Was the baby placed in the oven by Hamas terrorists? Or hidden there, when the oven was not on, by his parents, only to burn when the terrorists set the house on fire? Both of the child’s parents were found murdered at the scene.“There is no witness left alive,” Mr. Beer says. When the reports of the baby first emerged, skepticism over their veracity was expressed by some, including an Israeli journalist who heard from other EMS groups and the IDF spokesman’s unit that they hadn’t yet encountered the case.“The scale of the attack was massive,” Mr. Beer says in response. “No one group would have seen more than a third of what happened, not even the army. There were so many different groups involved in the recovery.”The attacks, amounting to the single largest loss of Israeli life in a single day, resulted in more than 1,400 deaths and more than 240 hostages being taken back to Gaza. There are still some 200 more bodies that are unidentified.The landscape of the assault stretches across the entire Israeli side of the Gaza border, from Zikim in the north to Holit in the south and Ofakim to the east, with massacres committed at nearly every community in between. Other atrocities committed by Hamas during the attack include burning victims alive, rapes, beheadings, torture, and dismemberment, including of children.“We must show the world these gruesome sights,” Mr. Moskowitz says at the conclusion of his testimony, “and to tell the world that it is impossible to deny what these savages did.”
