Michal Peer’s official first day of work as the head forensic anthropologist with the Israel Center for Forensic Medicine was Oct. 8, 2023.
Although she had already been performing those duties for most of the year, the timing of her official appointment was, to put it mildly, intense.
It was, of course, the day after Oct. 7, the Jewish state’s day of infamy, when terrorists from Gaza-based Hamas launched a war against Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, and kidnapping some 240 others.
Like many Israelis, Peer — who spent much of her youth in Denver — knew that something was terribly wrong before she even knew what was taking place on Oct. 7.
“For whatever reason,” she told the Intermountain Jewish News in a recent Zoom interview, “I woke up early that day. I was awake when the sirens started going off, about 6:30 in the morning.”
As her cat strolls casually into the Zoom view, Peer relates how she scooped up her pet and dashed to her bomb shelter, the computer room in her apartment in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv.
“I was in here for about two, two- and-a-half hours,” she says, “and on that morning, every time we reached the end of 10 minutes, there was another siren. I wasn’t sure what was going on. I didn’t know the full scale of it then because it’s not the first time I’ve encountered rocket sirens.”
The director of the Tel Aviv-based Israel Center for Forensic Medicine messaged the entire staff, including her, and provided the basic facts of the attack, as detailed as they could be related at that early stage.
He told them: “You all need to be on call and be ready to come in so that we can deal with it.” And indeed, in the afternoon, we were told it’s all hands on deck.
A plan was devised within hours of the massacre. Bodies of the victims were already being collected by Israeli military and police personnel, as well as volunteers from Zaka, the volunteer organization that strives to make sure that the bodies of Jewish victims of terror attacks are handled according to Jewish law.
In this instance, the word “bodies” isn’t entirely accurate. What were being gathered near Gaza were often only pieces of bodies, or charred bones, since many of the victims had been burned by Hamas; or broken fragments of bones, since many were killed in explosions.
The institute’s goal and Peer’s responsibility as its head forensic anthropologist — essentially the leading such specialist in the entire country — was to identify as many of these fragments, or “samples,” as she calls them, as accurately and quickly as possible.
“There was a big, big rush to get samples from as many of the people who were killed as possible so we could start the identification process right away. So, for the first week or so I was helping out in the DNA lab. They were getting hundreds of samples a day, so having an extra pair of hands to help with that was good.
“Once the first wave of identifications was over and they started bringing remains to the institute, they started bringing bones as well. That’s when I jumped into my position as a forensic anthropologist, the only one in the country who is actually employed by the government, the Ministry of Health.”
On her first official day of work, Peer was indeed “jumping in” — “very much,” she says, “with two feet.”
Peer, 30, was born in Buffalo, NY and spent much of her youth in Denver, the daughter of Jeff and Leah Peer, who still reside in the metro area.
She earned her undergraduate degree at UCD and her master’s at the University of Central Lancaster in England. She is now completing her PhD at Tel Aviv University, having made aliyah to Israel in 2018.
Her focus has always been on forensic anthropology and virtually all of her professional experience has been with the Israel Center for Forensic Medicine.
She describes her calling with a balance of professional detachment and heartfelt empathy.
Although her specialty might seem hyper-scientific to the uninitiated, those who have watched police procedural series or cold case documentaries on television probably have some idea of what she does.
“Essentially, the whole point of forensic anthropology is identification, specifically identification from bones. There are several things that I can do. First is differentiating between human bone and animal bone. If I do have human bone, there are certain signs to tell me whether it has forensic significance or whether it’s something older, potentially archaeological.
“There are measurements and observations that can be made to do estimations of age at death, biological factors, sex, how tall the person was, if they had European or African ancestry. You can look for different illnesses that affect the bones, like osteoporosis, and also signs of trauma — gunshot wounds, bullet holes or knife markings, anything like that.”
Whether the bones belong to a missing person, a crime victim, an individual from hundreds or thousands of years ago — or those who were massacred by Hamas last Oct. 7 — “the whole point is to build a profile of a person,” Peer says, “which can then be passed along to the police and they can see if it matches with a missing person.”
Missing persons, as a rule, leave loved ones behind, and when Peer is in her laboratory working on bones that may have belonged to such missing persons, those loved ones are foremost in her mind.
“The whole reason I got into the field is not just because it’s very interesting and I enjoy doing it; it’s to help the families.
“We’re not just talking about something that’s related to an event that happened recently or currently. We are also able to look at bones from the past. In 2018, we identified the remains of a soldier who had gone missing during the Second Lebanon War and we were finally able to bring his family closure after a long time.”
Regarding Oct. 7, the hardest single case on which she has worked so far, Peer says, has been the search for a 12-year-old girl who is believed to have been killed in the initial attack.
“They had just combed through this house and the area around it so much that we had bags upon bags of bones from this place. We were looking for some sign of her amongst the remains.”
After exhaustive examination, Peer says, “we were eventually able to find something that we could identify as belonging to her.
“But I just can’t imagine what it must be like for the people who don’t know what’s happening to their loved ones, who don’t know where they are; so for me, the important thing is helping to bring those people the idea of closure, to help give some peace of mind to people.
“This is why I got into this field — to ultimately make sure that nobody, as much as possible, is left unidentified. There is always the possibility that sometimes there’s nothing we can do, but we are not at that point yet, and we are not going to stop doing the work that needs to be done.”
From the very beginning of the war, Peer and the team of fellow scientists who have been assembled at the ICFM have kept that consideration in mind as they worked through the huge number of human samples that have been brought to their laboratory.
It’s a daunting task, she says, acknowledging that many if not most people would probably find it impossible to perform.
Peer provides a glimpse of what it’s like to do this work.
“We had to figure out how many individuals there were,” she says, “because sometimes we would get multiple people in one packaging. Houses were blown up and burned to the ground. We were getting a lot of very small fragments of extremely burned bone, 700 degrees Celsius (1292°F) or higher for long periods of time.
“We were picking through, separating bone from non-bone, looking for doubles. For example, if we had two right arms that would tell us we were looking at two people, or sometimes more. We were piecing together bones from small fragments and doing as much as possible to send DNA samples to the lab, but when the bones are really burned, there is no DNA left.”
Most of the samples belonged to Israeli victims of the assault, including small children, adults and seniors.
But some were those of Hamas members, Peer says, since their fellow terrorists sometimes exploded homes which their comrades had already entered.
Such forensic findings, when they are somewhat conclusive, are then paired with more conventional investigative techniques in hopes of providing conclusive identifications.
Intelligence reports, testimony from relatives and eyewitnesses, video footage and other forms of evidence are part of that process.
In the wake of Oct. 7, the numbers have been considerable.
In a normal calendar year, Peer says, her institute handles around 2,000 cases requiring forensic anthropology. As of the end of 2023, it had handled 3,400. She has worked on more than 300 of them herself since the war began.
“Many hundreds” of individuals murdered on Oct. 7 have been identified, she says.
“I don’t have the information about exactly how many people we’re still looking to identify in total,” Peer adds, “but the sheer ability of the staff to identify so many people in such a shout amount of time is, I think, nothing short of extraordinary.”
She and her staff have been working nine to 10 hours a day for more than three months. At the beginning, it was six to seven days a week and only recently have the scientists been able to take one or two days off on weekends.
“That’s what we’ve been doing ever since Oct. 7.”
Her education and experience in forensic anthropology has been of invaluable assistance to her in the recent traumatic weeks. She recalls an exercise while working on her master’s during which her class did a simulated mass grave exhumation.
“But it’s really not the same,” she admits. “It’s not the same as getting the remains of hundreds of people and having to pick through them. Before this, I had never had to deal with the bones of children.
“And that was a big part of the horror of the thing. We’re looking at men, women, children, people of all ages from 12 to elderly. The sheer magnitude is something that I wasn’t really prepared for on an emotional level.”
While much of the rest of Israel is returning to something resembling their normal lives, she says, “we are still in crisis mode at the institute because the pathologists are still getting bodies and I’m still getting bones and the lab is still getting hundreds of samples. So, on the one hand, it’s very emotionally difficult.
But on the other hand, I also have to say, ‘OK, I will let it be emotionally difficult for me afterwards. Right now, I need to be able to move forward and to keep doing my work.’”
Trying to maintain a level of personal and emotional detachment from the victims is a challenging but very necessary dimension of her work, Peer says.
She says she keeps a list in her head of the names of the individuals she has managed to identify so far, “because I want to be able to understand and know and feel a connection to the people that I have helped personally with their identification,” she says.
“On the other hand, part of the work is not knowing those details, because you can’t let that bias you in searching. It’s very much a balancing act of professional detachment and remembering that these were people who were alive not that long ago.”
Of great help to Peer and her colleagues has been the encouragement of the many volunteers who have joined the titanic effort of identification.
“They’re very proud of me and of the work that I’m doing, and extremely supportive.” she says.
She, in turn, is very proud of her professional colleagues and how well they are managing to handle the emotional baggage.
“It certainly does take a toll, but everybody in the institute has stepped up,” she says. “Nobody that I know of has been like, ‘I can’t handle this, I’m going away.’ Nobody’s running away.”
During the current ordeal, she says, she’s largely been unable to lean on religious faith for emotional or spiritual support. Which doesn’t mean that she’s oblivious to that power.
In working with many Zaka volunteers and the IDF rabbinate, she has learned to have respect for their religious points of view.
“An important part of what we’re doing is not just to identify the people, but also to acknowledge Jewish spirituality, to say, ‘We found part of a skull, therefore we know for sure that this person is no longer living, and we know that the soul of the person is in this bone, therefore we can do an official burial and give the family that final period at the end of a sentence.’ There’s very much a spirituality connected with aspects of what I do.”
Zaka volunteers, who are mostly Orthodox men, have shown a corresponding respect for the nature of Peer’s work. She initially thought they would have little consideration for the medical and scientific nature of forensic anthropology.
“But it is completely the opposite,” she says. “They’re very respectful of what we do.”
It’s one example, she says, of secular and religious Israelis coming together in new ways in the wake of Oct. 7 — an unexpected consequence of the horrors that took place that day.
She hopes that one day — no matter how far in the future — Israelis and Palestinians might also find it possible to come together, while admitting that such a possibility seems remote right now.
The challenges and horrors of her work over the last three months have only reenforced her conviction that peace is not only possible but necessary.
“I think it’s made me feel even stronger about the fact that we really need to find a way to have peace between our groups,” Peer says.
“In my everyday life I interact with all sorts of people — with Jews, with Muslims, with Druze. I know that peaceful coexistence is possible. This has definitely strengthened my opinion that we really need to find a way to be peaceful because the loss of civilian life on either side is horrible. It’s terrible.”
Chris Leppek may be reached at IJNEWS@aol.com
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