Philadelphia medical examiner returns from Israel after identifying war crime victims
Dr. Julia de la Garza examined about 100 war crime victims, including countless bodies of women and children.
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- A medical examiner with the city of Philadelphia responded to an urgent call for help in Israel to identify the dead.
She is now back home and sharing her harrowing story of seeking closure for families.
Those horrific images being viewed around the world of the sheer horror of the Israel-Hamas war are real cases that this Philadelphia associate medical examiner has now witnessed for herself.
"I've seen some pretty horrific things," said Dr. Julia de la Garza.
She has been on U.S. soil for just over 12 hours after a 10-day trip to Israel where she examined about 100 war crime victims, including countless bodies of women and children.
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"These are atrocities of war and my job is to just document the medical legal aspects of it, and the presence of absence of injuries, and really help families move on in the grieving process," she said.
Just eight days after Hamas' deadly attack on October 7, Dr. de la Garza and three other American medical examiners were suiting up at the National Center of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv.
She's well versed in examining gunshot wounds but says seeing blast force injuries from homemade rocket-propelled grenades was shocking.
"These are shrapnel from the RPGs, which none of us as American physicians are familiar with because we've never been to a war zone before," she said.
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Refrigerated trucks carrying the dead arrived multiple times a day, all while the doctors lived under the constant stress of incoming missiles.
Dr. De La Garza says she relied on an app that would send an alert or siren, warning of an incoming missile.
"That to me was the most stressful part because (being) alone at night in the hotel room, suddenly the siren would go off and you had 90 seconds to get to the shelter. And then you had to wait in the shelter for 10 minutes and then you were given the all-clear," she said.
We asked her what anyone might ask: how do you emotionally detach from the horror and carnage?
"I have to put it in a box and compartmentalize where it is," she said.
Between the four American doctors, they examined 400 bodies in 10 days. She says she's never taken life for granted. But now being back home, she wants Americans to know how lucky we are to be so protected and safe from the atrocities of war.
