Before October 7, they were not a number. They were people living their lives. There were family photographs on the walls. Clothes in closets. Children's toys. Meals left behind. Cars in driveways. The ordinary things that fill a home and tell you that people live there.
Three years later, we know October 7 through numbers. More than 1,200 murdered. 251 taken hostage. Thousands injured. Entire communities attacked.
Those numbers matter. They tell us the scale of the attack. But they can also make more than 1,200 individual people sound like one statistic. For the volunteers of ZAKA Search & Rescue, that distinction was impossible to miss.
Hundreds of our volunteers were among the first responders after the attack. Over the recovery operations that followed, thousands of volunteers took part in the work across Israel. They worked in communities throughout the south. They responded in the north after Hezbollah began launching rockets at Israel. They continued working across the country as people lived with the threat of further attacks.
The mission itself did not change. ZAKA Search & Rescue has always been there to identify the dead, ensure their dignity according to their faith and traditions and help families searching for answers.
What changed was the sheer scope and scale of what our volunteers were called to do.
They went from home to home and community to community. And in those places, they saw more than the aftermath of a terrorist attack.
They saw the lives that had been there before it. They saw personal photographs taken before October 7. Photographs of parents with their children. Families celebrating together. People at ordinary moments in their lives. They saw belongings left behind and homes that still looked like homes, even though the people who lived there were gone.
They saw young people who had gone to a music festival and never came home. They saw the aftermath of Hamas' deliberate attack on civilians. They saw things that no one should have to see. They heard things they should never have heard. They smelled things that cannot be forgotten. They came to understand what had happened in those communities in ways that cannot be captured in a photograph or a news report.
For our volunteers, there was no “more than 1,200.” There was one person, then another, then another. Someone's parent. Someone's child. Someone's sibling. Someone's friend.
The work was to identify the dead and ensure their dignity. But the people being cared for were never simply bodies in an operation. They were human beings whose families were waiting for them.
That has always been part of the work of ZAKA Search & Rescue. October 7 did not create that commitment. It put that commitment to work on a scale our volunteers had never experienced.
And they carried what they encountered home with them.
After October 7, ZAKA Search & Rescue established its National Resilience Division to help our volunteers and their families process what they experienced and reclaim their lives. The work at the sites eventually ended. What our volunteers saw did not simply disappear.
Three years later, there is another danger. The more familiar October 7 becomes, the easier it is to speak about it without thinking about the people. More than 1,200 murdered. 251 taken hostage. Thousands injured. We need those numbers to understand what happened. But we cannot allow the numbers to become the story.
The people who were murdered had names, families, friends, homes, jobs and plans for the future. Some were parents. Some were children. Some were young people at a music festival. Every one of them was an individual whose life was taken from them.
The 251 people who were taken hostage were individuals too. All have now been accounted for. Some returned alive. Others were returned to their families after they had been killed.
The survivors are individuals. The families are individuals. The communities that were attacked are made up of individuals whose lives were changed forever. And the truth about what happened is not a statistic.
Hamas deliberately murdered civilians. It attacked families in their homes. It targeted people at a music festival. People were murdered, burned, maimed and sexually assaulted. People were taken hostage and brought into Gaza.
Three years later, those facts still matter. But so do the people behind them.
The volunteers of ZAKA Search & Rescue saw the photographs. They saw the homes. They saw the belongings. They saw the faces of people who had lives before October 7. They knew that “more than 1,200” was never really a number. It was more than 1,200 individuals.
Three years later, we must remember them that way. Never forget. Never forgive. Never again.
Dubi Weissenstern is CEO of ZAKA Search & Rescue.