ZAKA spokesman Moti Bukchin collapsed Monday night and was hospitalized in central Israel. Hours earlier, he had attended a meeting of the ZAKA team with psychologists in Kibbutz Ma'ayanot, at the end of which the singer Hanan Ben-Ari made a surprise appearance.
"There were great strengths there," Bukchin told Israel National News - Arutz Sheva. "The volunteers cried, sang and danced. It gave us great strength."
Bukchin, in his 40s, is one of the senior volunteers in the organization that has been operating in the Gaza border region for the past two weeks.
His family said that his condition is good and that they are asking the public to pray for his recovery; his Hebrew name is Mordechai ben Golda.
In an interview with Israel National News - Arutz Sheva, Bukchin said, "I have been in many terrorist attacks, but this was something completely different. First of all, the large number of dead. It is simply an astronomical amount that the mind, soul and body cannot contain. In addition, this unimaginable cruelty. It is worse than the stories that are told about the Nazis. The way they brutally murdered the women, children and the elderly and simply abused the bodies."
Bukchin spoke about to the mental struggle of the teams that handle the corpses: "We are already exhausted both mentally and physically. The ZAKA volunteers working in the field come from all over the country except for the veteran senior staff. We rotate the volunteers. The work is very difficult. I can say about myself that I have been in ZAKA for 25 years, it is very difficult to withstand it. It's something we haven't seen."
"We thought the Meron disaster was the biggest we had seen up to that time. It was the first time that ZAKA used a truck to transport bodies, something that would not have been imagined by us until then. Here we use a truck, and another truck, and another truck, and another truck, and it just doesn't end. It hurts and crushes our spirit," he concluded.