The Israeli dentist who helped identify bodies ravaged by Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack

In the wake of the deadliest single day in Jewish history since the Shoah, the team at Tel Aviv University’s School of Dental Medicine felt helpless.

Professor Rachel Sarig, the head of the school, desperately wanted to help her country at its time of greatest need, but she didn’t know how to.

Some departments began cooking meals for displaced families from the north and the south, while others started clothes collections to donate to people in need.

“We thought: ‘What can we do as the dental school? What is the one thing we can do that no one else can?’”

Sarig is not just a regular dentist, however. She is a dental anthropologist, specialising in the development of human teeth from prehistoric times to the present day. After finishing her postdoctoral training, she founded the Dental Anthropology Laboratory at Tel Aviv University. When an archaeological dig in Israel unearths an a 300,000-year-old set of teeth, her and her team are the first to be contacted to analyse it. 

In the aftermath of the Nahal Oz massacre, when 215 terrorists stormed the base just 850 metres from the border, Sarig was called. 

That is because the human remains – scorched by fire and explosive grenades – bore more resemblance to the discoveries made during archaeological excavations than bodies in routine forensic work.

"Dozens of physicians, dentists and researchers have been actively involved in the highly complex process of victim identification, which has been professionally led by the army and the police. Our role was to support their efforts in every possible way,” she says.

All the DNA traces on some of these soldiers had been burnt, so identification became close to impossible. “It was like a puzzle with thousands of pieces, and we were trying to put them together,” recalls Sarig during a talk in London to the Tel Aviv University Trust UK’s Women’s Circle.

Professor Rachel Sarig (back row, third from left) at a Women's Circle event for the Tel Aviv University Trust in London (Photo: Tel Aviv University)[Missing Credit]

Coincidentally, a PhD student at Sarig’s dental school had just wrapped up a project on the impact of fire on teeth – which can either shrink or expand in heat, depending on the temperature and time exposed. Through that data, Sarig and her team were able to help identify some of the 53 soldiers who were killed at the Nahal Oz base, including 16 female surveillance soldiers.

At Tel Aviv University, Sarig is a trailblazer, having helped to build the world-renowned research centres, including the Dan David Centre for Human Evolution and the Shmunis Family Anthropology Institute. But at home, she is an Orthodox mother of five, who grew up in Bnei Brak, east of Tel Aviv. Her husband, a retired tank commander, was called back to Gaza when war broke out and has been in the Strip for over 300 days.

Professor Sarig (right) with Tel Aviv University Trust CEO Cara Case. (Tel Aviv University)[Missing Credit]

 When I asked her how she copes with the emotional toil of her work, she says detachment is imperative. “It’s not something you think about,” she says. “It just happens. We’re used to it, working with bones, skulls, teeth and other remains.”

Recalling analysing the burnt human remnants at the Gaza border, sarig says: “I detached myself. I’m not thinking about this young soldier, I’m not thinking about the family. For me, it’s like: ‘Now, I have to do this research. I have to look at the teeth like I usually look at the teeth.’” But full detachment is impossible. A moment it all became real was when she had to cross-check her forensic findings with the Facebook pictures of a 19-year-old female soldier who had been killed in the wreckage.

The army also enlisted her school’s help to build a new AI algorithm to help identify deceased solders. The IDF holds hundreds of thousands of panoramic X-rays of every drafted soldier, but the army needed the assistance of Sarig’s students to train the algorithm. Due to its urgency, she sent senior students to do shifts day and night to help with the project. With funding from the Ministry of Science, the algorithm was up and running in less than a month.

In a country where the temperature is too hot for any DNA beyond the year 17,000 to survive – what Sarig calls the “curse of the Levant” – the intricate study of teeth is crucial to learning about the history of humankind and behaviour in Israel.

Tooth is also much stronger than our bone, she notes. “Even in cases where the bone deteriorates and disappears, the teeth are still there.” Sarig able to deduce information about ancient tribes from analysing the length of the root, the calculus and scratches on the tooth’s surface - from what people ate to whether they cooked their food.

The dental school at Tel Aviv University, founded in 1972, is a leading global institution, responsible for educating 70 students a year. Fifteen per cent of students aren't Jewish. “One of the things we make sure of is that everyone feels at home. When you come to the dental school, you’ll never hear politics.” Each trainee must bring in their own patients, so treatment rooms are often flooded with the students’ families – be it Muslim, Druze, Christian or strictly-Orthodox

Dental anthropologist Professor Rachel Sarig examines a CT scan of fragments of a skull and jaw found on an archaeological excavation site, in her lab at Tel Aviv University in 2021. (Photo: Getty)AFP via Getty Images

But she is not just training dentists how to perform a root canal. “We always tell our students: ‘We don’t treat teeth, we treat people.’” After October 7, Sarig got a phone call from the Prime Minister’s Office asking her for help treating the families of hostages. These people were so traumatised that just putting them through the public system would have been a disaster, she says, and they needed special, sensitive care.

Sarig teaches her students never to ask vulnerable patients the simple question: “How are you?” Instead, students should ask: “How are you today?” or “How are you now?”

She explains that otherwise, you risk sending patients into a spiral,  and they might think: “What do you mean, how am I? Everything is falling apart. My son has spent over 500 days captive in Gaza.” She also trains her students in learning how to accept patients’ anger at the government and political authority, which they, as dentists in white blazers, represent to an extent.

“You don’t defend the state. You just listen to them,” she says. Families whose loved ones are still being held hostage, in her experience, are also functioning in a different time scale to the average person. Everyday is a never-ending influx of news, so it is hard for them to keep to an appointment schedule. “These people have no concept of time. They are still inside the trauma – it’s not ending.”

The trauma on those directly impacted and the wider Israeli population is legible in the teeth. “When we are under severe stress, we tighten our jaws, we lock our jaws, we are not even aware that we’re doing it.”

Sarig says that some 60 per cent of the civilian population in Israel is suffering from PTSD. Some experiencing the stress can’t open their mouths in the morning, eat or speak, because of severe pain. Her team has had to begin extracting teeth that have cracked due to unconscious clenching. “We had it in Covid, and now we’re seeing it again.”

She has helped to build a new post-trauma clinic, where alternative treatments such as musical therapy, acupuncture, and physiotherapy are being trialled. There, dentists are injecting Botox into the muscles to help relax them.

Sarig calls her work a “national mission”. Though dental care is free for children in Israel under 18, many in remote or low-income areas still lack access. So, to bridge the gap, she arranges trips – unfunded by the government - transporting underprivileged children to the dental school in buses, giving them the help they need.

Life since October 7 has been a whirlwind for Sarig, as it has been for the rest of the country. She used to insist on doing a proper Shabbat dinner with her family, even when her husband was sent to Gaza, but as weeks went by, pizza deliveries became more common place

Although the aftermath of October 7 is heartbreaking, she feels she has a purpose. “You have to feel that what you’re doing is meaningful, otherwise you don’t have the power to wake up in the morning.”